When you walk into class just before the bell rings and every seat is already taken, you groan and grudgingly sit in the extra chair that’s missing the desk. You complain that the enormous number of students in the class forces you to forego a desk. You’re annoyed with the increase in school enrollment that has caused these large class sizes.
Class sizes may seem onerous for students, but compared to what MCPS predicts class sizes will rise to in coming years, Whitman is lucky to have only a slight student increase per class this year.
MCPS recommends a maximum of 28 students for English classes and 32 for the others, and Whitman classes are well within this range. This year, schools were to expect an increase of one more student per class to the school’s normal class size in previous years, which was about 32 students, due to increased enrollment across the county. The recent budget cuts don’t allow for the hiring of additional instructors. Whitman classes follow MCPS’s class size expectations, and the school is lucky that staffing has remained steady.
Only 34 of the 405 academic courses exceed maximum student capacity. The majority of these classes are either math, science, or NSL. Even though these courses are required and thus have higher enrollment, their sizes include only one more student per class, just as MCPS predicted. It’s a minimal inconvenience as compared to an increasing number of large classes that the county predicts schools will have in coming years.
This year, newly enrolled students across the county accounted for about a 2,200 increase, 700 students over MCPS predictions. Most of these students entered elementary schools, meaning that high school enrollment will start to spike in about five years. Increased enrollment equals more students, which leads to bigger classes, especially if the budget remains tight to offset the recession.
Whitman already has a record number of ninth graders, about 550, according to assistant principal Kathy McHale. With an increased number of students at the elementary school level, the grade size of incoming freshman classes will remain large. Comparatively, we are actually getting the better end of the deal with only eight percent of academic classes gaining one more student, and we should be appreciative that those numbers are not higher.