LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) — Lincoln Public School officials announced this week the district is close to fully staffed, adding more than 300 teachers and leaving just five classroom teaching jobs open heading into August.
Being fully staffed helps contribute to another one of their priorities — balancing classroom sizes.
“Class size, as you can imagine, makes a difference for individualized attention for every student,” said Dr. Sarah Salem, associate superintendent for teaching and learning. “And so when you think about a classroom who may have students with a variety of different needs, (it’s good) anytime you can increase the opportunity for teachers to get around and make those individual connections with every student.“
By Aug. 13, all of Lincoln’s more than 42,000 public school students will be back in the classroom.
District officials said Thursday they’re happy with the average size of those classrooms — around 20 in title schools and 25 elsewhere.
“We feel so fortunate in Lincoln that we have prioritized lowering class sizes,” Salem said. “It’s not just a benefit for students, but it also makes a difference in the teacher workload and making sure that teachers feel like they have the resources and support.”
Salem explained the district hires based on need, not numbers.
“It’s important to remember there are a lot of numbers and averages that we discussed with class size, but each of those numbers is a real student, a real teacher, a real person,” Salem said. “And so we take these decisions really seriously.”
Those class sizes impact teachers’ ability to individualize attention and feedback for students.
“We set targets for our elementary class sizes, and we always keep the target class size lower at kindergarten and 1st grade, and then it goes up just by a few for each grade level,” Salem said. “As students become more self-sufficient and more mature, then those class size targets are in the low 20s for the upper grade levels.”
For Nebraska State Education Association president Tim Royers — who has spent almost two decades teaching in the public school system — class size is one of the biggest things that impacts their work.
“We got to make sure, especially as there’s ongoing conversations about budget shortfalls at the state level, that we don’t let our schools become kind of the easy source to cut back on funding,” Royers said.
The district has plans in place to keep those class sizes as low as possible, even closing open enrollment for certain grades if numbers get to be too much.
“We do hold back a number of staffing allocation resources over the summer so that as class sizes might creep up over the summer and you might have a teacher in a certain grade level who’s nervous about that class size, we might be able to add a paraprofessional. We might be able to add an additional teacher if those human resources are available,“ Salem said.
Regarding staffing, there are still some specialized positions open such as speech-language pathologists and school psychologists.
The district is always looking for more substitute teachers.
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