35 Students, just 1 teacher
While the School Board chair is handcuffing critics the real work of the Duluth schools gets harder and harder to perform. The same Sunday Trib has what surely ought to be viewed as an expose of the overcrowding of our classrooms. Keeping our student-teacher ratios low was once paramount. Just how bad they’ve gotten can be deduced from these two paragraphs:
A yearly report of Duluth district class sizes shows a handful of elementary and middle school classrooms with as many as 35 students. Some high school classes, including core classes for math, science and English. have students numbering in the upper 30s. One German class has 41 students.
The Cloquet school district, whose latest scores were among the Northland’s highest in the state’s measure of Adequate Yearly Progress, also struggles to keep class sizes low. Some of its elementary-grade classes go as high as 27 kids per class this year, and its middle and high school class3es range from mid-20s to low 30s.
There is very little difference in the funding of these two school systems yet Cloquet has significantly lower student teacher ratios. I have suspected that school operations money has been finding its way into Red Plan construction. This would account for these deplorable ratios. Only an honest audit would uncover this. I’m hopeful that the former State Auditor and possible Governor Elect, Mark Dayton, would order up such an audit. I hope his Lt. Governor wouldn’t object.
If reporter Jana Hollingsworth had to get info from the outspoken Susan Van Druten its a sign that most teachers were paralyzed with fear and preferred to say nothing about their plight. I wonder how many teachers Jana had to go through before she finally realized almost none would talk to her? Most of our teachers feel handcuffed too.
