SEATTLE — Parents of Seattle Public Schools students packed a Wednesday school board meeting to voice concerns over split classrooms.
The split mixes students from different grades to keep up with the required student-to-teacher ratio and started over a month into the school year. The split primarily impacted kindergarten to third grade classrooms.
The district misjudged enrollment projections at more than 50 schools and now students are being placed in different classrooms and many have been assigned to different teachers.
Parents expressed concerns saying their children cried when they found out they were moving classrooms and the timing of the transition was disruptive.
"I realized that he was genuinely happy, genuinely happy, for the first time in a very long time," one parent said of her son's original classroom.
One teacher at Roxhill Elementary took the podium and asked, "Why do our students have to suffer due to a mistake by the district?"
Liz Abersold, a parent of elementary students at Adams Elementary, told KING 5, "In the spring, SPS low-balled the enrollment for Adams Elementary... so now, what we have, is one of our third-grade teachers is going to have to be displaced. That entire classroom of third graders is being split into three different classrooms of much larger class sizes."
"These adjustments are made to ensure students benefit from smaller class sizes, but also ensuring Seattle Public Schools again remains fiscally responsible," said SPS Superintendent Brent. C Jones. "Please work with us together because we're all one team trying to make this happen."
District leaders said they are reconfiguring because they are cash-strapped due to smaller enrollment numbers, and there isn’t enough money to mitigate their budget shortfall.
Worried about possible future implications this could have, another passionate parent took the podium to call for a forensic audit on the district. She said, "I will vote 'no' on every single levy that appears on my ballot if you so much as sneeze in the direction of a small school with the idea of consolidating or closing it."
SPS said split classrooms take place to maintain the required class size ratio for elementary school students.
The district said they are required to meet the 17 students to one teacher ratio, for kindergarten through third grade, to receive their full state funding.
According to SPS, a review showed that being out of line with the ratios could risk more than $3 million in funding.
The district said the reshuffling is not a result of a state superintendent’s office audit, but rather the annual reporting process that all districts go through to comply with regulations for kindergarten through third grade class sizes.