Littlest students fill Kalispell classrooms

The Kalispell School District is crawling with kindergarteners.

For the second year in a row, Kalispell schools have seen a kindergarten explosion, with all of the district’s 15 classrooms jam-packed with students.

“We are stuffed at the kindergarten level,” Superintendent Darlene Schottle said. “Two years ago, we had 292 kindergarten students. Last year, we had 328 kindergarten students.

“We have 375 this year.”

That’s a 14 percent increase from last fall, and a 28 percent jump from 2009. The numbers mean there are 24 to 25 kindergarteners in every classroom.

State accreditation standards say the student-teacher ratio should be 20-1 in kindergarten classrooms. But the district doesn’t yet have a place to put an additional classroom, Schottle said.

In one sense, the kindergarten enrollment boom will be a boon to the school district. Those extra students will bring in additional funding from the state.

“It’s a good problem,” Schottle said.

But it has caused frustration and inconvenience for some.

The filled-to-the-brim classes have meant many families haven’t been able to send their children to their neighborhood schools.

With five elementary schools across Kalispell, the district has embraced the neighborhood school model, Peterson School Principal Rick Anfenson said.

It can be difficult to explain to families who live within sight of the school why they can’t send their children there, he said. For the most part, however, people have been understanding.

“Our parents and teachers have been real supportive about it,” Anfenson said. “That’s the hard part: Schools feel bad when [students] can’t get in there. We would like to be that neighborhood school for everyone.”

Peterson has more displaced students than any other elementary school in the district, Schottle said. That’s largely because its first- and second-grade classes are as crammed as kindergarten.

There is still room in the upper elementary classrooms, Anfenson said. Accreditation standards allow for more students per teacher in those grades.

The school board will consider several options to accommodate the large primary grade enrollment at its next regular meeting.

The district has options in part because officials did not use all the rainy-day money they were authorized to spend while attempting to balance the 2011-12 budget, Schottle said.

The board had approved spending all of the elementary retention fund, an account set aside for use in case of emergency. School officials made additional cuts instead of using all the retention money to balance the elementary budget, so $100,000 remains in the elementary retention fund.

The district had set aside that money for use in 2012-13, but Schottle will recommend the board use part of it to alleviate the crammed kindergarten classrooms. Some money will remain in the fund for other crises.

“It would not be my recommendation to use the entire amount,” she said. “It’s still early in the school year. ... I always feel better if we have a little bit held in reserve to meet anything that might happen.”

One option the board will consider is relocating a school’s support services or a computer lab to create another kindergarten classroom, Schottle said. That would just barely alleviate the problem, she added.

“We would still have 23 or 24 [students] in every classroom,” she said.

The board will also consider whether to hire another kindergarten teacher or other certified help. If, for example, the district hired a certified librarian — Kalispell’s elementary school libraries aren’t meeting accreditation standards, either — kindergarten teachers could see some relief.

“If we used those [program retention] funds to bring full-time librarians back to the sites, we could reduce the [kindergarten] class size for at least a portion of the day,” Schottle said.

Adding paraprofessional staff or hours to existing aides’ schedules is another option. Accreditation standards give larger classes some leniency if teachers have support from paraprofessionals.

Another option is looking into a modified schedule for kindergarteners. Those students might have a shortened day or perhaps a four-day week schedule.

State standards require that students attend school for a prescribed number of hours, not days, per year, Schottle explained. And Kalispell’s kindergarteners attend school more than the state requires.

“We already provide more [instruction] ... by quite an amount,” she said.

A portable classroom is another possible, though unlikely, option, Schottle said. Adding a temporary classroom probably will be too expensive for the district’s budget.

“I don’t have the final cost yet, but it appears to me that it will be in excess of $100,000,” she said.

Some options won’t be considered, at least right now, Schottle said.

The district will not consider running a bond request to build a new classroom, she said. Part of the reason for that is the time it takes to put options together, not to mention seek the approval of the district’s voters. If taxpayers did support a bond, the kindergarteners wouldn’t be in kindergarten any longer.

“That is not a short-term solution,” she said.

Dropping full-day kindergarten in favor of moving to a half-day model also is not an option, Schottle said.

The district has seen positive achievement gains, particularly in reading and math scores, since it began offering full-day kindergarten, Anfenson said.

And while the move would free up some classroom space, the district would have to lay off teachers. It would cost the district money; half-time students don’t bring in the same dollars that full-time students generate from the state.

The board will discuss its options at its next meeting, scheduled for 6 p.m. Sept. 13 in the Kalispell Middle School library.

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com.