No worries about class size
By ROBERT LINNEHAN
The Cherry Hill Sun
8/1/2009

Parents with students at Beck Middle School should not worry about overcrowding in the classrooms for the next school year, Assistant Superintendent Jim Gallagher said. Even though the middle school reduced the number of teachers, the average class size at Beck will remain steady for the 2009-10 school year, Gallagher said.

Class size at the middle school will remain steady, he said, even though Beck has four fewer teachers than it did in 2008-09. The teachers were included in the reduction of 63 district employees after the flax tax budget was approved by township voters last year.

Voters approved a tax rate of $3.19 per every $100 of assessed property value. The 63 eliminated district employees saved the school district about $3.8 million.

Because the middle school was losing a team of teachers, Gallagher said there were two possible class options for the upcoming year. The first, he said, would be to limit three teaching teams to each grade.

With this option, each sixth grade class would have an average of 28 students, 22 in seventh grade, and 24 in eighth grade.

“Another way of looking at the situation is that we could divide our resources differently. The school could allocate more resources into the sixth grade which has the largest number of incoming students,”

Gallagher said. “Right now there are 337 students coming into the sixth grade for next year, 262 for seventh grade, and 292 for eighth grade.”

According to Gallagher, Beck Middle School Principal Dr. Dennis Perry decided to allocate more teams to the sixth grade to help deal with the larger influx of students. Three and a half teams will be used in the sixth grade and two and a half teams will be used in the seventh grade.

Allocating more teachers to the sixth grade was a fairly obvious choice to keep the class sizes down, Gallagher said.

“That’s what he’s (Perry) working on right now. We’re working on the assumption we’ll have a shared team between sixth and seventh grade,” Gallagher said. “When the discussion was happening in the community, I think people got ahead of themselves. Nobody likes the idea of having larger classes.”

With the sharing of teams, the average class size for sixth grade will be 24 students next year. Seventh grade will average 26 and eighth grade will average 24. This is well in line with the other two middle schools in the district, Gallagher said.

Gallagher also noted that this is a similar program that Rosa International Middle School utilizes to keep its average class size down.

It works well and is not a detriment to the students, Gallagher said, so it should not affect the students at Beck.