Letter: Middle schools need reasonable class sizes

March 16, 2021  |  By Maureen McCracken 

I would like to thank the Harwood Unified Union School District School Board for rescinding their last-minute decision to cut a middle school teaching team.

Cutting four teaching teams down to three in our middle level is a pretty big reconfiguration. To have had a short discussion and vote – timed after the budget already passed and at the last meeting of that board’s existence – was highly unusual. While the Feb. 17 decision to cut was technically warned on a board agenda, I think it’s safe to say many people didn’t know about it.

And yet, we are hearing complaints about whether the vote to rescind violated the public’s right to be involved. Since there was a lot of discussion in Front Porch Forum and social media after the board made the cut, and since the board had the teachers’ presentation about it on its warned agenda on March 10, it’s hard to imagine that people knew less about that discussion than the Feb. 17 one. 

How can it possibly be that a mere mention on an agenda that very few people look at is sufficient to make a decision to completely re-arrange our middle-level grades, but we need a lot more warning and discussion to restore it?

The vote to cut a middle school team was a bad idea a few years ago, and it still is now. If you believe class size matters and that we should be planning for average class sizes of 20 or less (which our own district policies do, as do most educators and people familiar with research), it will always be a bad idea to have three teams… unless and until we lose another 22 students in grades 7 and 8. That’s just how this math works. This is not about “us versus them” middle schools. This is about our kids, and all of them need reasonable class sizes. 

Our school board did the right thing. Let’s support them and encourage them to keep students as their focus.

Maureen McCracken

Waterbury

Maureen McCracken is a former Waterbury representative to the HUUSD School Board.