Spaulding board confronts enrollment dip, small classes
Toolbox
By David Delcore
staff writer - Published: September 3, 2010
BARRE — They aren’t pushing the panic button just yet, but members of the Spaulding High School board are concerned by what appears to be a substantial reduction in the number of students attending the school.
Just five years ago there were 978 students enrolled at Spaulding. By last September that number had dipped to 890 and when school opened less than two weeks ago the figure stood at 813 – a precipitous drop in just one year that members of the Spaulding School Board are struggling to comprehend.
“It just seems like a dramatic shift,” Chairwoman Norma Malone said during the school board meeting this week. “I’m trying to understand how we got from there to here?”
Part of the answer involves a slow but steady decline in enrollment at elementary schools in Barre and Barre Town, as well as in surrounding school districts that have historically paid tuition to send students to Spaulding. However, Malone and others wondered this week whether there might be more to it and, if so, what other factors were be in play.
“It may be too early to panic,” Malone said, suggesting school administrators analyze the numbers and report back to the board.
The enrollment update served as a segue to a discussion of class sizes. Board members, who have long complained that there are far too few students in far too many classes, were told by Principal Bob Phillips that their concerns have not been ignored. Over the past three years, Phillips said, the number of classes with fewer than 10 students enrolled has been cut in half — from 22 to 11.
Still, several board members suggested there remains room for improvement, with some questioning the need for two separate sections of advanced placement English — one with seven students and the other with eight.
According to Phillips, those numbers would be somewhat higher if five students hadn’t chosen to take an online version of the course at the school district’s expense.
School Director Nancy Pope said that wasn’t what she had in mind when the board agreed to allow students to take virtual courses. The idea, Pope thought, was to give students the opportunity to take elective courses that aren’t offered at Spaulding, not “core courses” that are.
“It’s going to start to chew away at what goes on in this building,” she said.
Phillips said a board-adopted policy spelling out student use of online courses might clarify matters.
Meanwhile, Superintendent John Bacon wondered whether some of the small classes — most notably the advanced placement English classes — were the result of a reasonably predictable and potentially avoidable scheduling conflict for students. He said offering advance placement courses in different subject areas at the same time might be part of the problem.
Malone said that problem is compounded by the fact that advanced placement courses at Spaulding are a year-long commitment instead of being taught in a semester, as is the case at most other area high schools.
With enrollment shrinking, School Director John Santorello questioned the wisdom of offering several specialized courses in a single subject area.
“We’re competing against ourselves,” he said. “There will have to come a point in time that if we get down any lower (in terms of enrollment) that we’re just going to offer core courses and let them (the students) take the fancy electives when they go to college.”
Malone said the courses to which Santorello was referring were primarily geared toward seniors though she too worried that the experiment wasn’t working.
“I’ve always had my concerns about this and it’s basically played out,” she said. “We have more options than we have students to fill the classes (and) that is a very real issue ... We have a much bigger menu than there is an appetite for.”
In addition to tweaking the schedule to eliminate predictable conflicts, Pope said the board might consider offering fewer sections of the same class.
School Director Giuliano Cecchinelli urged the board not to overreact. He noted that despite losing nearly 80 students, 16 classes are at the recommended maximum and several of those classes are actually over-enrolled.
“We can improve, but we can only push it so far,” he said. “It can’t be perfect.”
david.delcore
@timesargus.com
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