Middletown School Budget Can't Support Third Teacher Position: Superintendent

Middletown parents and members of the Moody School PTA were displeased to find that the first grade classrooms were being reduced from three to two this year.

A Change.org petition was created to petition Superintendent Patricia Charles, Enza Macri and Board of Education members, in the hopes that a third teacher for Moody School’s first grade will be reinstated.

As of 2:30 p.m. Friday, August 15, the petition had 142 supporters.

Charles sent the following message to parents and shared it with Patch:

I received your emails and understand your concern that 24 students in a first grade class is far from optimal. We would like to have class sizes under 20 in the primary grades. We are unable to do so at Moody this year. We purposely wait as long as possible to have the truest numbers due to the high mobility during the summer in many of our school districts.

We had 26 students in Farm Hill kindergarten classes this past year. Bielefield’s 5th grade had 29 in one of the classes. This year there are 200 students in the high school study hall. Snow School’s kindergarten is at 25 as of today. I’m sure you would agree that these class sizes are unacceptable also. We had to realign our teaching staff in terms of the needs across the district.

We work hard to maximize our resources. All levels would benefit from additional teachers. I wish I had better news to report to you, but we do not have the budget to add the staff we would all like to hire.

Regretfully,

Patricia Charles, Superintendent

Would you support a higher school budget if it resulted in smaller classroom sizes or are you pleased with the present situation? Weigh in via our comments section and share your thoughts.

(Photo Info: Moody School via Middletown schools site/Patch archives)