San Mateo, Foster City Schools Start Year-Round Classes With More Students: Growing District Cramps Classrooms at Year-Rounds
By Neil Gonzales, San Mateo County Times, Calif.
Jul. 31–FOSTER CITY — Brewer Island Elementary third-grader Ryan Michelsen was excited to start a new school year.
Why? “Because I like recess,” he said.
The 8-year-old was also happy to see familiar faces. “At my table, I sat with everyone I knew,” he said.
Brewer Island and six other year-round schools in the San Mateo-Foster City Elementary District opened Wednesday with plenty of energy from students, parents and teachers but also with a little less elbow room. Schools on the traditional calendar begin the year Aug. 27.
While other districts are experiencing declining enrollment, the 10,000-student San Mateo-Foster City district is projected to grow over the next few years.
Education leaders are trying to address the growth, but some parents are worried that the increasing student population, if not managed well, will hurt the quality of their school.
“It’s the quality of education being compromised by overcrowding and the fact the district didn’t plan for this,” said Janice Acton, whose daughter attends Brewer Island. “We’re still a good school, but (the growth) is making it hard for everybody and the students are paying for it.”
Acton was particularly upset about how the growth issues have affected the kindergarten program.
The influx of additional kindergarten students, combined with a lack of space, has forced the school to juggle things around, parents said.
“The kindergarten teachers and
their students are going from one room to another instead of being able to sit down in one room,” Acton said. “It’s time being taken away from instruction.”
District board member Lory Lorimer Lawson said San Mateo-Foster City has been planning for the growth.
The planning started even before the board put the $175 million Measure L bond on the ballot earlier this year, Lawson said. “But we couldn’t move forward before we got people’s support,” she added. “There are steps that have to take place before you move forward to be responsible to the public.”
The bond passed in a landslide in February. It will pay for portable classrooms at a cost of about $250,000 to accommodate the growth at Brewer Island, Baywood Elementary and Audubon School, according to a district staff report.
Brewer Island will receive two portable buildings, but parents complained that those won’t arrive for another two months.
The growth is “still manageable,” said Ryan’s mother, Bridget Michelsen, “but there’s a lot more people and a lot more cars out front. Parking is more difficult.”
At the start of this school year, the district expected to see an enrollment increase of about 170 students — most of it occurring at Brewer Island, Baywood and Audubon, according to the staff report.
The district could reach the 11,000-student mark in 2011, according to a demographer.
At Brewer Island, kindergarten teachers Karen McCarthy and Julie Chamberlain joined forces to find a creative approach to handle the extra students.
That approach includes team-teaching larger groups of students, sharing materials and using each other’s classrooms, McCarthy said.
“We’ve asked to do this together to help the situation,” she said.
But for the most part, the first day of school went fine, parents and teachers said.
“Everybody was happy to be here,” McCarthy said.
Reach Neil Gonzales at 650-348-4338 or ngonzales@bayareanewsgroup.com.
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Copyright (c) 2008, San Mateo County Times, Calif.
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