Small schools

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Home : 2001 : April : 29

Small schools
By Steve

Having (briefly) taught part-time for a very small (about 200 students K-12) district, I can agree with this completely. All the parents had to do was threaten to pull their kid(s) out of the district and open-enroll them
in a neighboring district for the administration to cave and pretty much do whatever the parents wanted (even to the point of asking one teacher to write an apology to a parent and student for taking the student aside for pushing other students in the hall and just threatening to give him a detention if he was caught doing it again!). We as teachers had only as much authority as the students

let us have, since all they had to do was go to their parents with a complaint and the parent would go to the administration or school board and that would be that. Cheating was rampant, but to try to fail a student for it (or for any reason, for that matter) was to put your job on the line.

And the school talked up its "small class size" as a big advantage, but then they gave me the _entire_ sophomore class in a single room all at once for World History... 33 students is a small total class size, but not a small class size when you put all 33 in a classroom designed to hold 24!