Fairfield Community School District Board of Education determine new class size goals

FAIRFIELD - School board members from the Fairfield Community School District gave an update on their discussions about the district's class size policy at their meeting on Monday evening.

Revisions to the policy were well debated among the board after it failed to pass a first reading at the board's October meeting. Several members were dissatisfied by the ambiguity of the suggested language, which would give the school board 'the sole discretion … to determine the size of classes and to determine whether class grouping will take place.”

The current policy in place holds the board to 'strive to maintain the state goal of 17 regular program students” for primary grades kindergarten through third grade and that class sizes 'should not exceed 30 students per class” in grades 4 through 12.

Though the policy itself was not on the meeting agenda, which prohibited the from taking any action, board members on the policy committee explained the process they took to determine the new wording of the policy.

Kelly Scott, a member who voted against the approval of the first reading of the policy said the policy committee did 'a lot of soul searching,” to determine the language.

'We've taken a look at recent history as far back as 2014 to look and see what class sizes have run,” he said, 'We decided that we wanted to put some numbers in there and shore up some of the language of stuff that was outdated and getting rid of the ambiguity of the policy that was previously done.”

Ultimately, the committee decided classes sizes for kindergarten through third grade classes would strive to remain in the twenty to twenty four students per class range.

'We came up with that by looking at the average class sizes, looking at the graduation class sizes being anywhere from 112 to 147 … it eliminates the number seventeen. Seventeen is almost an impossible number for us to have … so we came up with those numbers to try to get it so it meets the needs and gives us a place to start,” Scott said.

Board member John McKerley added the number twenty was chosen because 'it corresponded with the state number for the preschool.” He also noted the newly revised language of the policy suggested by the committee also includes the final clause from the previous policy, which states 'in cases where heavy concentrations of pupils occur, an occasional class size may be above the suggested recommendation for a temporary time.”

'There's a mechanism there to try to make sure we're consistently examining the class sizes and considering ways we might maintain smaller class sizes as they correspond to quality education,” McKerley said.

The class size policy is expected to be on the board's March meeting agenda for a second reading.