Concerns About Crowd Control

At Sandy Hook School

By Jeff White

The classes of Sharon Vitrano, a special education resource teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School, used to occupy half a classroom. This gave her plenty of room to shift unfettered from student to student sitting around her circular table, to lay out number lines across the floor for instructional purposes, and to set up a large easel with lesson plans penned in different color ink.

Now she sits in a room not much larger than a storage closet, her round table, which has at most four fifth-graders sitting around it, has only three chairs, and the number lines must be unrolled out in the hallway.

“The growth [in student population] has affected me because we don’t have the space,” she said. “I’m in tight quarters.”

Sandy Hook School is exceptional in Newtown in how, year after year, its population continues to grow. Hawley School’s enrollment currently is at 547 students, Middle Gate is at 547 and Head O’ Meadow is at 539. Sandy Hook has 700 students enrolled this year. Whereas the other elementary schools expect only nominal increases in their populations, Sandy Hook fully expects their enrollment to swell to 770 by next fall.

 Kindergarten through third grade at Sandy Hook each house six “sections,” or classes. The district average is four. School administrators plan to add two more sections to the fourth grade, which currently has four classes averaging 26 students per room. An additional class is planned for the fifth grade, which currently averages 25 students in each of its four rooms. At least one more kindergarten session is being considered, bringing the total kindergarten sessions to seven.

A part time speech instructor works out of a cramped office in the language arts room; an occupational therapist works out of a closet-sized room in the gymnasium. The music room is half the size it used to be, and one music teacher has to teach on the stage of the cafetorium. There are not enough math discussion books to go around in the fourth grade—students have to share.

Mrs Vitrano’s smaller classroom is evidence of a school looking at ways to weather overcrowding.

Administrators at the school have implemented ways to handle its space needs that represent “the best viable alternatives,” according to Donna Pagé, Sandy Hook School’s principal.

Special instruction, like music and art, have been at times relegated to a mobile state – “art on a cart,” as it is known – to free up classroom space. The school holds nighttime functions like open house on multiple days to alleviate not only the parking problem but also the number of students and parents converging on the school on a given night. School concerts are often held either at the middle school or high school. Gym classes have been combined.

And when they have to, school administrators have looked to the classes that can be the most flexible in their scheduling. That usually means kindergarten.

Because they don’t require lunch services, and are only on the school’s premises for about three hours each day, kindergarten sections have been molded to help with the school’s space concerns. Kindergarten classes do not use the library, but instead the library comes to them, which frees up space for the upper classes that have more needs in terms of research. Kindergarten sections do not attend school assemblies, but a cultural arts committee has been formed to bring special programming specifically to the kindergarten classes. Five-year teaching veteran Janet Vollmer insisted that although kindergarten classes have changed, it has not been to the detriment of her students.

Kindergarten class sizes per session have not really increased much, she said, and the students do not miss out from having alternative means of library and assembly. “I do think there is a lot of support,” she said.

And relief for Sandy Hook School might be only a few months away. Four portable, or modular, classrooms are slated to be installed during the summer months, which will house the two additional fourth grades and the one additional fifth grade, as well as another class. The classrooms will be located to the rear of the school, jutting out into the back playground and accessed by a corridor branching off the back main hallway.

The classroom space that these rooms will free up would be used not only to accommodate an additional kindergarten session, but also to give special instruction classes like music and art a full-time classroom to use.

Mrs Pagé called the district’s choice to bring in portable classrooms the “less dramatic” option of dealing with Sandy Hook’s space concerns. “If we didn’t do this,” she said, “it would mean tearing down walls.”

For now, Mrs Pagé is looking ahead and holding her breath. She knows that despite the pre-registrations that the school holds in December, and the official registration that will occur in April, new families like to move to town during the summer, and their offspring tend to inflate enrollment projections. It is only during the summer that the true reality of how much more Sandy Hook’s population will grow next year becomes apparent. 

It is a challenge, said Mrs Pagé, not only to disrupt as few classes as possible, but also to “maintain a small school atmosphere” amid a growing student body.

And if neighborhoods such as Yogananda, Charter Ridge, Canterbury and Cobblers Mill continue to grow at their current rate, that challenge will grow even more acute.

“There needs are still being met,” said Sharon Vetrano of her students. On a given day, she sees nine groups of special education students. “We make due with what we have to make do with.”