School officials cite budget problems
By: Rachel Silverman
One Latin class has 29 students.
An advanced French section packs in 26.
Beginning Japanese boasts 28.
At Princeton High School, these numbers are not atypical: Thirteen of the school’s foreign language classes have more than 25 students.
According to a group of parents at Monday afternoon’s meeting of the Board of Education’s Program Committee, these statistics are compromising student achievement.
"We think it’s impossibly large for effective language learning and teaching," said Mary Harper, who has a son in advanced French.
Ms. Harper, a former language instructor herself, discussed how large class sizes hamper conversational language exercises. According to Ms. Harper, such exercises are critical in acquiring proficiency.
She added that large classes foster a wide disparity of skill levels.
"Twenty’s the magic number that reappears in all the reports I read," she noted.
Priscilla Russel, the district’s supervisor of world languages, explained that the rising numbers are due to increased high school enrollment figures. She also said certain languages, like Japanese, have seen a recent spike in popularity.
The overcrowding is so acute that six students eighth-graders at John Witherspoon Middle School who are supposed to go up a grade for language have not been able to take classes at the high school this year. Instead, the students have been forced to attend classes they have already placed out of at the middle school level.
Both Ms. Russel and PHS Principal Gary Snyder said that while they do try to adjust student schedules, the complexity of the class selection process does not allow for much give or take.
"It was a zero-sum game for language," Ms. Russel said.
She and Mr. Snyder pointed out that the district’s policy does not allow for more than 30 students in a class.
Though members of the Program Committee expressed sympathy, they cited a tight budget situation as a cause of the overcrowding. Because of S-1701, the state law that limits budget increases and the amount of surplus that can be carried over to the new school year, they said districts have limited resources with which to work.
"The burden is going to be on us to be very inventive in how we supply instruction," board member Jeff Spear said. "Unless something gives down the road and you can’t count on it we’ve got a problem."
Assistant Superintendent Jeff Graber predicted an equally gloomy future.
"We’re going to be in a very, very difficult budget cycle for ’06-’07," he said. "It impinges us from doing business in a rational manner."
Among other suggestions, board members said they would look into alternative scheduling options and ways to use technology to enhance foreign language instruction.

