News

Class size mandate would cost county $3.5M and could crowd upper grades

By Bill Moss, Published: January 5, 2017

A law ordering smaller class sizes in K-3 classes would cost Henderson County schools $3.5 million a year for new personnel and new mobile classrooms, the School Board learned on Wednesday. And if the schools did not come up with extra money, the class-size mandate could mean bigger classes in higher grades or dropping music, art and other non-core instruction in elementary schools, administrators said.

After a site visit at Edneyville Elementary School, the School Board met briefly in the school library and previewed items on Monday night's regular business agenda. Among the items on the docket is a report from Scott Rhodes, the school system's chief human resources officer, on implementing the class-size mandate the Legislature enacted last summer.

In a presentation he prepared for the Monday night meeting, Rhodes reports that the mandate would force the school system to add 48 teachers or shift that many from higher grades to kindergarten and first, second and third grades. The personnel cost would be $2.5 million. A second consequence of the law is that the school system would have to add new classrooms to meet the class-size mandate. Rhodes calculated that elementary schools would need to add 21 mobile units to accommodate the new classrooms.

"When you start adding 48 positions you have to have some place to put them," Rhodes said.

Chair Amy Lynn Holt brought up the class-size mandate on Wednesday and asked whether the Legislature had allocated money for the extra teachers the law would require school districts to hire. It did not, Superintendent Bo Caldwell said.

School Board members had little immediate reaction since they had just learned of the cost and potential impact on upper grades or other programs.

"In other words, we have to find 48 teachers with no additional money and no additional alotment (of state-funded teachers)," said board member Mary Louise Corn.

In interviews on Thursday, Caldwell and Rhodes said school districts are lobbying the Legislature to pull back from the mandate. Although the state House passed a fix that school districts favor during a special session last month, the bill died in the Senate when the General Assembly adjourned.

"I think you can find out how other school systems have really started looking at this and how it’s going to change how we look at class size," Caldwell said. "A lot of schools don’t have the extra space for these classes." He cited Atkinson Elementary School as an example. "He’s got to have two more or three more K-3 classrooms. Well, there’s no place to put them."

Administrators also say putting a request for more money in their budget request for the 2017-18 school year is not a good option because counties adopt their budgets by July 1 while the Legislature often goes into overtime and enacts a budget later in the summer.

"There would not be an expectation for that to happen," said Rhodes, of a request for an additional $3.5 million for 48 new teachers and 21 mobile units. "The commissioners have been generous in trying to give the schools what we've asked for. To ask for another $3.5 million, that's not a realistic expectation."

Last summer the Legislature ordered the state's school districts to lower the maximum average K-3 class size from 21 students to 18 in kindergarten, 16 in first grade and 17 in second and third grades while reducing the maximum individual K-3 class size from 24 students to 21 in kindergarten, 19 in first grade and 20 in second and third grades. House Bill 13, which local school systems favor, relaxed the changes. The maximum average class size next school year would be 21 students in kindergarten, 19 in first grade and 20 in second and third grades. The bill also would have set the maximum individual class size next school year at 24 students in kindergarten, 22 in first grade and 23 in second and third grades.