Hoisted from the comments: what the cuts mean in Berkeley schools
Regular commenter Deirdre reports:
Our Berkeley Public School kindergarten has 4 classes this year instead of the 3 that our school was built to hold. We had 4 classes last year as well. Now the teachers’ lounge has become a classroom for the third grade. There are no available classroom spaces left, but I expect they’ll bring in 4 K classes next fall as well. Our teachers are mostly great – - but one outstanding new teacher was bounced this year in favor of returning veteran teachers, not all of whom are outstanding. The two adminstrators who dealt with parent outreach and discipline issues are both gone this year. They might replace one, but it’s not clear. Still: BSEP is a godsend, no question. The K classes in Oakland now have 24 students, whereas Berkeley’s are still at 20. Thank you, thank you Berkeley voters.
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My daughter is a senior at Berkeley High this year, and all her classes, with one exception, have around 40 students in them. There aren’t even enough desks to go around do students have to bring in chairs and line them up against the walls.
Ironically, her smallest class is 4th year Latin. In previous years the class has had more than 40 students, but since UC only requires three years of language, lots of kids dropped Latin this year. There are only 23 kids in that class.