Class sizes for Lynn schools take shape

LYNN – The Lynn School Department will unveil a plan to alleviate classroom crowding at some elementary schools this week as 2008 enrollment figures begin to take shape.Superintendent Nicholas Kostan said Monday that he expects to have a detailed announcement on teacher movement and classroom changes by Thursday night’s School Committee meeting.School officials have been warning that some class sizes would be larger this year since first announcing the closure of two city elementary schools due to budget cuts last spring.The consolidation of school facilities forced the department to relocate nearly 400 students from the Fallon and Washington elementary schools, leaving classroom numbers bloated at other area schools like Tracy and Sewell-Anderson, which took on many of the displaced pupils.In anticipation of the overcrowding issues, the department put aside money to retain 10 teachers this year to be assigned after school started to schools with high classroom counts.”That is something we are still working on this week, but I expect to have the full details for the committee Thursday,” Kostan said.Kostan has already found a home for three and a half of those teaching positions and says he will have a plan for the others Thursday night.One teacher was added to the third grade at Ford Elementary, another to the second grade at Sewell-Anderson and a third to the Tracy’s first grade.One half-position was created at the Marshall Middle School, which was in need of a reading specialist.The superintendent has expressed a desire to work out overcrowding issues within each school’s present staff by combining classes with smaller numbers to free up staff members. For example, if one school had two third-grade classes with 12 students each, those classes would be combined and the remaining teacher would move to a class that was too large and needed to be split.Kostan says he wants to use this method first to ensure that he does not waste the 10 unassigned teachers at a school where they are not needed.Enrollment figures can be deceiving in the first few weeks, due in large part to Lynn’s transient population. Often schools will have inaccurate class rosters due to last-minute transfers and school changes, making it difficult for principals to get a grasp on exactly how many students are in each class.Lynn, like many other school districts, looks at enrollment figures as of Oct. 1 each year, rather than the first day of school.Thursday’s School Committee meeting should be a busy one, as Kostan is expected to give a detailed presentation on the city’s MCAS scores, which are scheduled to be released Wednesday of this week.The state issued a list of schools that did not make Adequate Yearly Progress Friday, listing 16 of the city’s 22 schools as having not met the state’s improvement requirements under the No Child Left Behind Act.Overall, Lynn kept pace with the rest of the state as 50 percent of Massachusetts’ schools failed to make the grade under new NCLB guidelines in 2008.