Students take toll of overcrowded schools

It doesn’t take long to fill an East Pierce County school yard with portables. In fact, portables usually start popping up only a year or two after a new school building is opened.

School officials aren’t poor planners, they just aren’t allowed to build new facilities to a projected enrollment size and still qualify for vital state matching funds. That leaves them with two options: To build to projection solely with bond money and ask taxpayers to cover the entire cost, or to use state matching funds and construct new schools with the current enrollment numbers, knowing classrooms will be overflowing on the day it opens.

The Office of Superintendent of Public Institutions, which sets the regulations on school construction, should take a closer look at what the requirement to build to current enrollment is doing to our schools. While there is a risk of overbuilding on projected enrollment numbers, under building takes an even bigger toll on students when schools are already overflowing the same day they open.

Bonney Lake High School opened three years ago and already has 200 “unhoused” students, a term the district uses to refer to the number of students beyond the capacity of the school. School administrators must find creative ways to accommodate the overflowing population. Bonney Lake uses “flex space,” which was intended to be gathering areas for multiple classrooms, as teaching space.

Other schools use stages or other empty spaces in addition to portables, just so there is enough room for all the students. Prior to the construction of new elementary schools, Puyallup’s Brouillet Elementary School didn’t have space for any more portables.

Overcrowding at schools doesn’t only affect the classrooms. School cafeterias are affected, for example. Some schools have been forced to increase the number of lunch periods. The first lunch period starts at 10:30 a.m. while other students have to wait until 1 p.m. Some Puyallup schools have brought in portable toilets to accommodate increased numbers of students.

The state requires schools to exceed their capacity before allowing districts to build new schools. Frequently, even when new schools are opened, it does little to decrease overcrowding in the older schools.

The Sumner and Puyallup school districts face difficult times ahead as several large housing developments on the horizon will surely boost student populations.