Our school has seen years of steady growth in enrollment. Now, WJ is at capacity. Three years ago, the school enrolled 556 students in the freshman class. This year, over 600 freshmen are enrolled in the class of 2015, 50 to 100 students above county projections for the year. Though the school has had a steady increase in enrollment since the early 1990s, the school administration has struggled to place the extra students in classes.
“As you can imagine, required courses fill up quickly,” said the director of the school’s counseling department, Dennis Reynolds. “What we’ve actually seen, though, is that many of our elective courses are full.”
The effect of increased enrollment is not limited to a single department. Though elective courses are fuller than required ones, every department is dealing with the additional enrollment.
“The immediate effect of [increased enrollment] is large class sizes, just about everywhere,” said social studies resource teacher Ty Healey. “As a department, there’s not a whole lot we can do in terms of staffing if we’re full everywhere.”
Limited staffing have forced elective departments to “stack” classes, placing students of different skill levels in the same room, with a single teacher who has to teach two or three courses; for example, Ceramics levels 2 and 3, as well as AP Ceramics, must share class space. This allows for less individualized attention than in separate classes, but is necessary to accommodate the extra students without additional hiring. The Board of Education has allowed the school to increase the limit on students that can be in a classroom at one time. Preventing overcrowding is always a necessity, but “overcrowding” is not well-defined. By raising the cap on class sizes from, for example, 32 students to 35 students, the capacity for students can increase without hiring teachers.
“[The county] did increase the cap on students,” said art resource teacher Stephanie Ellis. “At some point, if we have too many kids, we’ll have to increase staffing. We may even have to deny students [the ability to take] electives. We have never been this full.”
Healey expressed similar concerns. “I don’t know what happens if we’re understaffed. We’re staffed about as tight as we can be. It’s hard to imagine that [the administration] would cut staffing.”
The sudden increase in enrollment can be partly attributed to a decrease in the number of students attending private schools – a national trend, but more noticeable in this area, which has a high concentration of private schools. With the cost increasing at a faster rate than wages, many families are putting their children into public schools. The added demand on the school system is showing, evident in the 2012 budget for the Department of Education. The public school system is spending $1,000 less per student on average than was spent two years ago. MCPS had to cut nearly $24 million from salaries to make up for a lack of revenue. These cuts come at a time when schools need to hire more teachers to accommodate more students.
The issue of student enrollment will not come up again until administration has to determine the schedules for the incoming freshman class. Even as students walk through the halls of WJ for the first time, policymakers in Rockville will decide which teachers will walk through those doors as well – or who will walk out of them for the last time. Students may not notice any changes, but teachers and other staff will be waiting anxiously for a decision at the start of the new school year.
