Word

“Word.”  That is what my husband said before hanging up the phone with me today.  Last night, my daughter told me I was “phat”.  Apparently, we are going through a slang phase in our home.  Since I grew up in a small town in New Hampshire, the only slang I ever learned was “wicked awesome”.  We might have thrown out “totally” or “cool” now and then, but to this day, awesome is usually the best I can come up with. 

When I say I grew up in a small town, I mean a really small town.  There were sixty students in grades one through six, and we all fit into a three room school house.  Thirty years ago, the town had 500 residents and a general store that was also the post office. But I never felt like I was from a small town until I went over the mountain to Junior High and High School.  Leaving my red brick school house, I joined students from nine other towns and suddenly found myself in a school with 400 students.  It was a huge culture shock and there was quite a learning curve, but the change was necessary for my education.

When I think about the education system in Windham, and all of the growth the town has experienced in the eleven years I have been here, I see that we are undergoing a similar struggle to leave the comfort of being a small town.  Indeed, Windham continues to grow while other cities and towns in New Hampshire are experiencing dropping enrollment figures. 

Faced with very real growing pains, we need to take some significant steps to accommodate our students.  The High School was a big one, but didn’t solve the problem which according to my notes, has been looming on the horizon since 2004. At that time, it was predicted that Golden Brook School would need an addition by 2008.  In fact, an addition to Golden Brook was in the town Capital Improvement Plan.  If you follow the numbers like I do, you would know that the reason for that prediction is the current fourth grade class.  Known as the “bubble”, this group of 250 has been making some wave as it has traveled through the elementary schools.   We got them through Golden Brook by putting specials on carts.  We kept them together at Center School by splitting the current third grade.  But as the younger class sizes keep getting growing, by next year we simply won’t have room for them.

Bummer, dude.

Whatever you call it, this “bubble” is not an anomaly.  Recent population projections conducted by the Facilities Master Planning Committee suggest we can expect an average of 230 students per grade within the next ten years.  We are over the mountain folks, and the time is now to do something about the capacity issues in our lower schools.  Whether we renovate the Middle School, or build a new one, I think it would be wicked awesome if act like what we really are: a big town, with 2,647 students who deserve the best education we can give them.

True that.