Koerth: Overcrowded classrooms aren’t a solution to balancing Minneapolis Public Schools’ budget

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When Courtney Bailey-Tetevi was a kid in Chicago, her firefighter father would drop in randomly at her grade school to check up on her. “He never caught me misbehaving,” she said. “He never caught me out of line.” Now a mom of three boys, she’s continued this tradition, regularly stopping by her younger sons’ Northside grade school, Bryn Mawr in Minneapolis. But while her sons continue to meet family expectations, Bailey-Tetevi has noticed a change this year as she walked through the halls and sat in on classrooms. “I’ve seen children having emotional breakdowns,” she said. “I’ve seen these poor little babies crying.” On one visit, she found a little girl hiding in a bathroom who told Bailey-Tetevi that she didn’t want to go back to class because she just didn’t feel comfortable.

The problem, Bailey-Tetevi says, is too many kids and not enough teachers. The most recent teacher contract with Minneapolis Public Schools stipulates caps on class sizes — limits on how many students can be taught by a single teacher. The number varies by grade and socio-economic vulnerability of the students. At Bryn Mawr, where 87% of the student body is eligible for free and reduced lunches, grades K-2 are capped at 22 students, third grade at 25, and fourth and fifth at 30. Currently 65% of classrooms are above this cap, based on data from the school, and that’s the best it’s been all year. At times, multiple classrooms have packed in 35 children or even more.

Bryn Mawr is an outlier. But it is not an exception. Overcrowded, chaotic classrooms filled with stressed-out children and exhausted staff and teachers have been the norm in MPS this year, with multiple grade schools around the district bringing complaints to the school board and administration. Thanks to reporting by Minneapolis School Voices, we now know that these higher class sizes were part of the cost-savings plan proposed to Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams after she took on her position last year.

But the district cannot continue to balance its budget at the expense of our children’s education — especially the education of the most vulnerable children.

Bryn Mawr is a school I know and love. Both my daughters attended from first grade on and my youngest is still in fourth grade there. But my kid is privileged in ways a lot of her schoolmates are not. Bryn Mawr has a higher-than-average percentage of special-needs students, including Bailey-Tetevi’s fifth and third grade sons, who have autism. The same situation that makes my daughter annoyed creates much larger challenges for her boys.

“Children on the spectrum, they can’t deal with big old crowds like that. It’s overstimulating,” Bailey-Tetevi told me. This year, her sons have struggled to pay attention in class, they’ve come home so exhausted they couldn’t get out of bed the next morning, and they’ve dealt with much worse bullying.

Most special needs students split their time between general education classrooms and small group learning environments where their particular behavioral, educational and emotional needs can be met. What that looks like in practice varies a lot by child. Some kids spend 30 minutes a day getting speech therapy. Others, particularly those struggling with both learning disabilities and trauma-induced behavioral challenges, spend almost their entire school day in a special classroom. At Bryn Mawr, some of these small groups are autism-specific and others are not. All of them, however, are suffering from a lack of teachers and staff, said Elizabeth Barrett, a special education resource teacher for fourth- and fifth-graders.

Special education “small” groups are often small in name only, with teachers attempting to support as many as 12 or even 15 kids at a time — and these are kids with high needs. The teachers don’t have time to focus on helping that many children through both big feelings and schoolwork. “It’s becoming harder and harder to actually educate,” Barrett said. We lose quality of instruction [in classrooms with more than] five kids.”

Meanwhile, when special education students go into general education classrooms, they’re supposed to have support staff with them to help them keep up with the lessons and stay safe and comfortable socially. But there simply aren’t enough of these staff members to go around.

This means autistic students like Bailey-Tetevi’s sons can end up losing out on general education time they need for skill-building because sending one or two students into the classroom would mean sending their support worker, too — leaving a single teacher alone with the rest of the small group. It can also mean one support worker is stuck trying to juggle eight high-needs students, who all have to spend different numbers of hours in two different general education classrooms. Even when teachers are able to solve that logic-puzzle of a scheduling problem, it’s not an adequate staff-to-student ratio. When those general education classrooms are, themselves, overcrowded and understaffed, the situation can become truly unsafe.

This is when you get problems with bullies, with disruptions, even with violence. “We’ve had incidents of chairs thrown, tables knocked over, classes having to be cleared. It’s wearing down all our staff members,” said Sarah Moen, an instructional specialist at Bryn Mawr who has been helping in classrooms this year outside the scope of her actual job because of the overcrowding. None of that is the students’ fault, Moen said. It’s the fault of a system that isn’t providing the support everyone knows those students need.

Special education students deserve to have their needs met. They are kids who can learn and grow and they deserve a learning environment that helps them do that. But right now, that’s not what Minneapolis Public Schools is providing. “Everyone is short on money. I get that,” Barrett said. “But these are some of our highest-needs kids. We shouldn’t have to beg for the basics.”

And this problem shows why, in general, increasing classroom sizes as a tool for balancing the budget simply does not work. The job of the district is to provide our kids — all our kids — with an equitable education. If we want special education students to learn and grow, general education students to hit those test requirements, and both groups to thrive together … we cannot just keep throwing 30 children into a room and crossing our fingers. The budgeting process for next year is underway now. It must prioritize smaller classrooms and adequate staffing. Without that, the district cannot claim anything like equity in education. And without equity in education, it cannot claim anything like success.