Cramming for Class
LOWELL -- Here's what a 12th-grade English class looks like at Lowell High School: Thirty-seven students are stuffed into the room, and there are not enough desks for everyone.
Senior Joe Wahome sits on a chair, using his lap and the flat cover of a textbook to write. And senior David Davis tends to be silent. "I'm more quiet in larger groups," said Davis, 17. "But in my smaller classes, I'm more active."
Teacher Dennis Canney is forced to lecture his students about the works of Chaucer, instead of discussing them, because back-and-forth conversation could get unwieldy. Canney's English course illustrates what most of the school's 3,940 students know: Their school might be the second biggest in Massachusetts, but it is not big enough. This year, as enrollment inches toward a 20-year high, pride about the school's size is turning to worry.
The enrollment boom is not over for Lowell High or anyone else: The US Department of Education predicts that more than 14.7 million students will be in the nation's high schools by 2006, up from 12.2 million in 1994, before numbers are expected to fall. Locally, schools are feeling the pinch, fueled by the growing ranks of students and tighter budgets.
Plymouth's two high schools are 600 students over capacity, and Chelmsford wants to add labs and classroom space to its high school to accommodate more students. Some school districts, such as Worcester, have put their plans to build new high schools on hold, because the state froze its overburdened school-building assistance program.
At Lowell High, administrators, teachers, and parents wonder whether the school that graduated Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac can sustain another year of teacher layoffs and no new space.
"We're at our breaking point," headmaster William J. Samaras said, "and I'm not going to go backwards."
Lowell High is not even the biggest public high school in Massachusetts. That distinction goes to 4,274-student Brockton High School, whose website boasts that it is the size of an aircraft carrier. But unlike Brockton High and many suburban schools, Lowell High sits downtown, hemmed in by city streets, with the little available space, eaten up in 1997 during a $40 million expansion.
Last year, ninth-graders took classes across the street in a building vacated by the city's arts magnet school.
This year, Lowell High is running out of options. Fifteen teachers and administrators left or were laid off. Samaras pledged to cap ninth-grade classes at about 25 students and even smaller for advanced-placement courses.
So something else had to give. Half of the school's 173 math courses, for example, have more than 30 students. About one-fourth of the school's 280 faculty members are "traveling teachers," meaning that they have no room of their own and instead move from class to class, wheeling all their supplies and paperwork on a gray, waist-high cart.
"That constant transitioning back and forth is not the best, but we have no choice," said math teacher Mary Ham, who can no longer use such math tools as plastic geometric shapes, because she would have to lug them around.
In the 1970s, Massachusetts school districts responded to a high school enrollment bulge by building schools on sprawling campuses intended to house several thousand students, a model now derided as impersonal.
Today, high schools are subdividing those buildings into smaller units or establishing specially focused academies to give students more one-on-one attention, from teachers who can keep better track of them.
Those forces are at work in Lowell, but so is the tug of history. Samaras worries that the pressure of the bigger enrollment and fewer teachers will erode the gains the school has made since 1991, when he became headmaster. Back then, the school laid off one-quarter of its teachers, had only part-time guidance counselors, and was placed on "warning" status by the region's secondary-schools accrediting agency.
But using the millions of dollars delivered under the Education Reform Act of 1993, the state's poorest cities, like Lowell, rehired teachers and beefed up programs. Today, Lowell High has done what many urban schools have not, retained middle-class families who could either head to the suburbs or to private schools.
There are 29 sports, including crew and lacrosse, and a $5 million fund-raising campaign is underway, complete with a glossy brochure that resembles a prep school marketing campaign.
Lowell High's MCAS scores still trail state averages, and the dropout rate hovers around 10 percent. Samaras, a 1959 graduate of the school, fears that those statistics will worsen unless he gets both space and more staff. He proposes moving into the second half of the building that now houses the ninth-graders, but that would mean kicking out the city's oldest magnet school.
Lowell High is sizable: Almost seven Fenway Park playing fields could fit into its 670,000 square feet. But the school has lost teachers, gained students, and has little new space in which to put them.
A few blocks away, at the headquarters of the Lowell public schools, Superintendent Karla Brooks Baehr said she is aware of Lowell High's growing pains. But she said she cannot overlook the enrollment needs of the city as a whole, which will be affected by plans to redraw attendance zones and open a new middle school. About 16,000 students are in Lowell public schools this year.
"It's going to a major piece of our work this winter to get some plans in place, all of which makes it complicated to solve the high school problem quickly," Baehr said.
Even in an age of downsizing high schools, supersize campuses, like Brockton's, have their advantages for students seeking a niche.
"I dare you to find another school with a Dungeons & Dragons club," said Brockton High senior Michael Nardi. "It's good to have more options for things to do. It makes you want to be involved."
— Anand Vaishnav
Cramming for class
Boston Globe
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http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2003/11/15/cramming_for_class/
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