WINONA, Minn. — By voice vote the Winona School Board voted to give administrators the flexiibiity to assiign elementary tudents to schools outside their desughated school attendance districts to even out class sizes. The change will create efficiencies by eliminating small classes. Class sizes now are projected to range from:
> Kindergarten: 17 to 22 students.
> First grade: 19 to 24
> Second grade: 20 to 25.
> Third and fourth grades: 23 to 26.
> Spanish immersion: 17 to 26.
The district’s elementary schools:
> Goodview: On Far West Ninth Street.
> Jefferson: Centrally located on West Fifth Street.
> Washington-Kosciusko: On Mankato Avenue on the Far East End.
Verbatim
John Casper, School District spokesperson, offered this explanation: “For example, right now we have two sections of 26 or 27 in third-grade at W-K, and we keep having more people move into the boundary with third-graders. In the past, we would have had to add those third-graders into an already crowded classroom. While we have “closed” those classrooms to accepting any more students, our previous policy did not give us a legal leg to stand on to deny admittance to those sections to anyone who lived within the boundary. While those families have accepted spots elsewhere in the district, if they were set on having their child attend third-grade at W-K, we would have had to accomodate that. What this does is provide the district with more freedom to balance class sizes by shifting students who may be in one attendance boundary to another school (and provide free busing). This helps us from a budgeting perspective as well because it gives us more control over how many sections we need to offer in each building. Many times in recent years we’ve been caught in a “no-man’s land” in August between expanding to three sections or holding at two. ”