Class sizes draw look from parents BY LARRY RAMER Staff Writer MARLBORO — Two parents of children who attend the Asher Holmes School suggested at a Sept. 16 Board of Education meeting that class sizes at the school may be too high. "When school started there were 25 kids in my child’s class; now there’s 26. What constitutes a big class? After the budget cuts were passed last year (by the Township Council), I thought the highest class size would be 25," Ann Ahne, the mother of a second grade student, told board members and district administrators. Superintendent of Schools David Abbott said he did not believe the quality of instruction at the school was affected by the size of the classes there. He said the principal of the school is monitoring the situation. Assistant Superintendent of Schools Marc Gaswirth went on to note that in three of the four classes at the school that contain more than 25 students, two adults are often present. In addition to the regular classroom teacher, an instructional assistant or a special education teacher is often present in these three classes. While the additional adults are primarily assigned to instruct the classified students in the room, they do work with the other children, Gaswirth said. s walking in one year, there’s no possibility of making class sizes as low as we would like." Moreover, many of these larger classes include three or four children who receive basic skills instruction outside of the classroom, Abbott said. As a result, the number of pupils in the larger classes usually drops to about 23 when the core subjects of language arts/literacy and mathematics are taught, the superintendent said. "Language arts/literacy and mathematics are the subjects I’m most concerned about as far as class size, since in social studies and science larger class sizes work well because the children primarily work in groups," Abbott said. Another parent of an Asher Holmes pupil, Beth Levine, a former assistant teacher in Great Neck, N.Y., said her son was in a class of 28 pupils at Asher Holmes and noted that there were two other classes of 28 students each at the school. "I’m concerned about the burden of the class size on the teachers ... and I don’t want my son to become just a number," Levine said. Research on the subject of class size has found that reducing the number of children in a class does not improve stu­dents’ learning abilities until there are 15 or fewer students in a class, Abbott replied. "I’ve talked with the teachers in the school about this situation and they feel they’re delivering the product that needs to be delivered," the superintendent told parents. Abbott also said the size of the classes this year is not unusual. "We try not to do it, but we’ve always had classes of 28 or 29 kids in some places since I’ve been here," said Abbott, who began his tenure with the K-8 dis­trict about six years ago. "In a district that’s grown as fast as this one — with 250 new first-graders walking in one year, there’s no possibility of making class sizes as low as we would like."