With an 8-0 vote, the State College Area school board agreed Monday night to create four new elementary-level teaching positions and four associated support jobs for the 2010-2011 school year.
The school year begins next week. David Hutchinson was the only board member absent from the meeting.
Adding the extra jobs, expected to cost about $300,000 for the year, will allow the district to ease ‘class-size overruns’ at four elementary schools, according to a recommendation from Superintendent Richard Mextorf. They are the Corl Street, Lemont, Panorama Village and Park Forest schools.
Corl Street will receive an additional first-grade teacher, a move that will reduce first-grade class size there from about 30 to 20 students. The Lemont, Panorama Village and Park Forest schools each will receive an additional kindergarten teacher, trimming their respective kindergarten class sizes from about 25 to 19, from 26 to 18, and from 25 to 19.
‘We can afford to do this, and we also can afford to sustain this,’ Mextorf said of the new hiring. He said the district can draw on its pool of existing substitute teachers to fill the jobs this week, and that money for the positions could come from several sources. Those may include $200,000 that’s anticipated in federal stimulus dollars; a $250,000 contingency fund in the 2010-2011 budget; an unallocated, $100,000 increase in a basic education subsidy; and about $140,000 in savings realized through reduced copier costs.
Michele Rowland, a Corl Street parent, expressed gratitude to Mextorf for his addressing the issue.
But, she said at the board meeting, she first raised concerns about upcoming class sizes several months ago. Rowland said she found it tough to get information from the district about ‘how many (students) is too many’ for a single class.
As recently as July, she said, it appeared the district was still taking a ‘wait-and-see approach’ to the class-size situation. Rowland she said she wonders that if parents had not mobilized to lobby the district, ‘would we be starting school with 29 and 30 students’ in some elementary classrooms?
‘I trust that you will come up with a specific protocol for how to deal with this in the future,’ Rowland said.
Mextorf said the district ‘absolutely (needs) to do better with that, and we will.’
Speaking after the meeting, he said a parent had brought his attention to the impending class-size problem at Corl Street. He looked into that concern but did not immediately investigate whether similar problems would affect other elementary schools in the district, he said.
Once he examined the matter broadly, he realized the district needed to address class-size overruns not only at Corl Street but also at the Lemont, Panorama Village and Park Forest schools, he said.
‘This happened much later than any of us would like,’ Mextorf said in an interview, referring to the late-summer hiring. ‘We can and will do better.’
Mextorf, who joined the district about a year ago, said he didn’t find strong evidence that the local school system had a consistent way of dealing with class-size overruns. That, he said, had left school administrators at all levels with few established tools to handle the issue as it arose.
He said the district will establish a detailed and thorough contingency plan for such situations. He also said he was grateful to parents for their feedback and input — and he encouraged other parents to contact his office directly with any concerns as they arise.
In other news Monday night:
- The board approved a resolution that formalized its commitment to plan for upgrades at State College Area High School. The measure also indicates that the board plans to hold ‘a public referendum to issue electoral debt for upgrades to (State High) at an appropriate time.’
- The board agreed to hold its Sept. 8 work session in the State College Borough Municipal Building, 243 S. Allen St. Board members will gather in the Borough Council’s third-floor meeting room. They will be testing out the facility as they mull whether to change their venue for meetings and work sessions more permanently.
- The board discussed a draft of the District Educational Technology Plan. The tentative plan includes an ultimate goal of issuing one computer per student, a move that would require an additional $1.2 million annually in ‘life-cycle funding’ for computer equipment. The district currently spends $1.7 million in life-cycle technology funding each year. Board members appeared generally supportive of the one-computer-per-student idea, though the concept has yet to be formally implemented — and financed.
Earlier coverage: State College Board To Formalize State High PlanningSchool Board Venue Up For Discussion
