Parents use Voorhees BOE meeting to voice concerns over class sizes at ET Hamilton

Class sizes at ET Hamilton Elementary School were once again the focus of the public comment portion of the Voorhees Township Board of Education meeting.

At the board’s Nov. 23 meeting, several parents spoke about what they categorized as the “unacceptably large” fourth-grade class sizes at the school where one class consists of 26 children and two classes consist of 27 children each.

Parent Eliza Comodromos-Langan, who has a fourth-grade student at the school, said tightly packed classrooms are adversely affecting the learning experience of all children, especially in the classrooms where there’s a solo teacher and no instructional aid.

“Kids are distracted and teachers are overwhelmed, all of which could have been avoided and can be avoided if class sizes are capped at a reasonable number,” Comodromos-Langan said.

Comodromos-Langan presented the board with a petition signed by ET Hamilton parents that called for several remedies.

Those fixes included adding instructional aides for the current school year to classrooms where there are none for English language arts and math teachers, ensuring that for the 2016–2017 school year, ET Hamilton’s fifth grade will consist of four classes as it does now and, starting in the 2016–2017 school year, implementing a cap on class sizes of roughly 22 children.

Another ET Hamilton parent with a fourth grader to speak at the meeting was Alisia Whitcraft, who said her daughter came home on the first day of school complaining that her legs were pressed against the room’s smart board because it was so crowded.

Whitcraft said a single teacher with no aid can’t give individual assistance in a room with 27 students, and she feared middle- and lower-level learners won’t get the help they need, and the higher-level learners would be left to fend for themselves.

“I feel like our test scores are going to go down based on this trend and our achievement gap is not going to close,” Whitcraft said.

Whitcraft also questioned why the district didn’t work to avoid the situation when it saw a larger number of new students registering for the fourth grade during the summer.

“I used to work in Cherry Hill as an assistant principal — in Cherry Hill they cap their schools, they send them to other schools that are less crowded. We didn’t do that. We had a problem that we knew about and we didn’t fix it and we let it occur.”

Parent Jason Ravitz also agreed that fourth-grade teachers need more help and shouldn’t be held at fault if students’ grades were to drop in classrooms with so many children.

During this semester, Ravitz said his daughter specifically told him she was not getting as much individual attention as she had in the past.

“These 10-year-old kids — they know the difference,” Ravitz said. “It’s not the parents. The kids alerted us to this. The kids want to learn.”

Superintendent Raymond J. Brosel Jr. thanked all the parents for voicing their concerns, and said while the district had no specific answers that evening, he did want to set up a meeting with some of the parents to discuss what can be done.

“We would like to come down and meet at ET Hamilton School and discuss what we can do for this year and plan for next year,” Brosel said.

At a past BOE meeting where the issue of fourth-grade class sizes at ET Hamilton was addressed, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction Dr. Diane Young noted that every year the district attempts to balance class sizes across the district, but in the past there have been instances of pockets where numbers were higher.