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Bonanza High School science teacher Ariane Prichard says campus safety issues can be explained by the kind of class rosters she got at the start of this year — up to 42 students in a period, crammed into a biology classroom not designed for that many people.
“I couldn’t find seats for all of my students,” she told the Clark County School Board at a recent meeting. “How am I supposed to make connections that are meaningful with my students when I have over 240 students on my caseload?”
They didn’t answer. But Prichard’s plea was familiar.
Colleague Kelly Edgar echoed it, and put a fine point on it: the Clark County School District needs to stanch the violence surging through campuses, and “the way to do that,” said Edgar, a choir teacher at Tarkanian Middle School, “is to lower class sizes.”
Sam Song, a professor of school psychology in UNLV’s College of Education, said violence was influenced by multiple factors. No one component, like lowering class sizes, will remedy it.
“It definitely could be helpful, but it’s not the only answer,” he said. “School safety is complex.”
Other possible responses and influences, he said: Systematic, “tiered” behavioral supports that become more intensive for the students most in need; school discipline policies; school and community climate and culture improvements.
“Class size is helpful because then teachers can, obviously, have fewer students to work with and to keep safe. That’s a common-sense thing. Smaller class size is linked to a lot of beneficial outcomes like better learning, better behaviors in class,” Song said. “But in the larger context, if you have just a small class size but you’re not attending to students’ wellness or mental health concerns, or students feel disempowered and discriminated against — these longstanding issues that maybe even families and communities are feeling as well — then you could still have a lot of issues with climate.”
Research is mixed on the effect that class size has on social outcomes.
According to a National Center for Education Statistics survey in 2010, 70% of U.S. schools with student-to-teacher ratios under 12-to-1 reported violent acts. With 16 students or more per teacher, that climbed, but only to 74%.
A 2020 Bard College study of West Bank schools found that “class size reduction improves the quality of life for children by mitigating the bullying and violent behavior among pupils that may negatively affect their achievements.”
Yet a 2019 paper published in the Frontiers of Psychology journal found that “surprisingly, very few studies found evidence of a protective effect of smaller classroom networks on bullying or victimization.” The authors, who studied middle school-aged children in Austria and the Netherlands, said the reasons why remained unclear.
But they suggested some possibilities, including bullies holding more sway in smaller classes, and targets having fewer opportunities for friends who could protect them.
An April study by the National Education Association ranks Nevada’s student-to-teacher ratio as the third-highest in the nation, behind only Utah and California. It’s an improvement for Nevada, which had the largest classes in the country in 2017 and 2018. (With about three-quarters of all Nevada schoolchildren enrolled in CCSD, rankings of Nevada education metrics are, essentially, evaluations of the district.)
Meanwhile, just through February, CCSD Police had fielded about 6,800 calls for violent incidents, including fights, assaults and batteries, robberies and sexual assaults. With three months until graduation and five months until the next school year, this year was almost even with the 7,001 calls in all of 2018-19, the last complete school year without pandemic interruptions to in-person learning, according to police data.
Gianna Archuleta, a senior at Advanced Technologies Academy, said CCSD needed to place more teachers on campus, along with more mental health professionals.
“We need smaller class sizes because teachers need to be able to do their job, and they can’t do their job if they’re overwhelmed with students and they’re acting more as babysitters,” she told the School Board last month.
A rally for school safety had just taken place outside the meeting chambers. An April 7 sexual assault and attempted murder of a teacher in an Eldorado High School classroom was still fresh on minds. A 16-year-old student is being charged as an adult with 15 felonies, including attempted murder and sexual assault.
Canyon Springs High School freshman Tyler Breeden said her health class was taught in a theater, and her English class only recently got a permanent teacher; when it didn’t have a substitute for the day, hers and other teacherless classes were sent to the gym for the period. Large classes “become impossible to learn in,” she said.
Kathia Sotelo, the youth justice organizer for the civic and social justice organization Make the Road Nevada, said students were tired of being ignored when they offered the district real solutions to violence, including smaller class sizes.
“Having 50 students in one classroom causes a rise in tension,” Sotelo said. “The teachers aren’t teaching anymore, they’re just trying to control a classroom.”
In fall 2019, before a pandemic-accelerated surge in teacher turnover, honors U.S. history at Centennial High School had, on average, 38 students per section, according to district enrollment data. The typical 10th-grade English class at Coronado High School or eighth-grade social studies class at Hyde Park Middle School: 31 students. Seventh-grade science at Sedway Middle: 35 children. Algebra at Bob Miller Middle: 42.
Electives and career and technical education classes can be even bigger. Chaparral High’s beginning auto shop class had 44 students. Tarkanian Middle choir classes had between 33 and 57.
A 2019 state law requires some elementary school class sizes be reduced to under 20, but only for general education kindergartners through third-graders — and the law allows “variances” for schools unable to meet the demands of student-teacher ratios of 18:1 for third-graders and 16:1 for the youngest children.
For the second quarter of this school year, 223 of CCSD’s 228 elementary schools received a variance, according to the Nevada Department of Education. About a dozen of these schools reported grades with at least 30 children per teacher. On average, classes are three to five students over the suggested limit.
Between 2019-20 and 2020-21, Nevada lost the largest share of its public school teacher workforce of any state in the nation, the National Education Association said — some 6%.
The exits aren’t slowing down. According to local research analytics company Data Insight Partners, which tracks CCSD data, about 1,700 teachers had submitted notices of separation this school year through April. A little more than 1,600 teachers leave the district in a typical, full school year, which runs through July, the firm said.
Edgar, the middle school teacher, said pay was too low, health benefits too poor, classes too big and the “burden” of possibly wearing a panic button — a district response to the Eldorado attack — too offensive to make teaching in CCSD attractive.
“Until this administration places a priority on lowering class sizes and increasing teacher retention, this crisis will continue,” she said.