Though administrators at Saxe Middle School have been creative with using existing space to accommodate more students in recent years, projected enrollment is high enough that the district—and wider New Canaan community—needs to look at capital needs for the facility now, officials say, including temporary classrooms and new construction.
With Saxe designed to accommodate a student population of 1,200, a five-year outlook that puts that figure steadily in the mid-1,300’s means that planning needs to happen right now, Board of Education Vice Chairman Scott Gress said at the group’s meeting on Monday night.
“I think that the 800-pound gorilla in the room is: What do we do? Where do we go?” Gress said at the meeting, held in the Wagner Room at New Canaan High School.
“We are moving and we’re putting things together and we’re creating the best opportunities in the short term, but we really need to think start to think and now about the future and is the future temporary classrooms or semi-permanent classrooms? Or is it new construction that is added to the building? If it’s new construction, have we begun to look at where it might fit? Those projects take years and if we don’t start moving now on them, when we need them we are not going to have them. For those of us who lived through some of the temporary classrooms back in the ‘Dark Ages,’ it is not the optimal thing where kids have to go outside to a trailer. I think that we need as group to assign a task force and look at it now, and look at it seriously and plan for it, because if we don’t put it in our budget, if not this coming year, next year, then we cannot possibly have it for four years out.”
The comments came following a summary from Gary Kass, the district’s director of human resources, of New Canaan Public Schools’ enrollment projection data from the Marlborough, Mass.-based New England School Development Council, or NESDEC. (You’ll find a good summary with data here, and more information on enrollment, class sizes and staffing levels here.)
New Canaan this academic year has a total of 4,203 students enrolled from pre-K through 12th grade, Kass said—a major part of the year-over-year rise (from 4,182) due to new kindergarteners.
“This number represents the second-highest enrollment in our history,” he said, after 4,219 two years ago. Projections from NESDEC over the next five years put that total figure at more than 4,400 steadily, and a breakdown by grade level shows the 5th-through-8th-grade segment bearing the growth.
Here are two tables that show historical and projected enrollment by grade combinations (article continues below):
Historical Enrollment by Grade Combinations
| Year | K-4th Grades | 5th-8th Grades | 9th-12th Grades |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2009-10 | 1,523 | 1,217 | 1,292 |
| 2010-11 | 1,530 | 1,218 | 1,348 |
| 2011-12 | 1,582 | 1,233 | 1,311 |
| 2012-13 | 1,614 | 1,288 | 1,276 |
| 2013-14 | 1,561 | 1,314 | 1,265 |
| 2014-15 | 1,625 | 1,292 | 1,251 |
Projected Enrollment by Grade Combinations
| Year | K-4th Grades | 5th-8th Grades | 9th-12th Grades |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2014-15 | 1,625 | 1,292 | 1,251 |
| 2015-16 | 1,631 | 1,335 | 1,243 |
| 2016-17 | 1,676 | 1,349 | 1,269 |
| 2017-18 | 1,628 | 1,355 | 1,304 |
| 2018-19 | 1,650 | 1,369 | 1,300 |
| 2019-20 | 1,633 | 1,375 | 1,342 |
“Simply stated, we know that we need more classroom space at Saxe right now,” Kass said. “At meetings held recently by the Enrollment and Capacity Committee, we discussed that in add to East and West being very close to capacity, Saxe Middle School is over. This is something that we are looking to address in the short-term and we may also need a longer-term solution.”
The main driver of the enrollments is a resumption of “in-migration” families with school-age children, Kass said—a phenomenon that had slowed down with the real estate market and is expected to rise again.
“For next year, the enrollment projections seem to imply that we are unlikely to experience a great increase in enrollment at the elementary or high school level,” Kass said. “However, Saxe will increase by 43 students and necessitate the need for considering additional classroom space.”
Though Saxe is a focus, Kass urged the board to be mindful of East and West Schools, which are at their full 29 sections each. Though projections call for flat enrollment there, “any further section increases could result in the use of a special area room as a gen education classroom.”
“At Saxe Middle School, with rising enrolment projected over the coming years, consideration should be given to the conversion of a computer lab and a language lab for classroom space for next year,” Kass said.
Board members commended Saxe Principal Greg Macedo for his creative solutions in finding classrooms for the middle school students in a fixed space, and also urged him to make plain his need for more physical space as the budget season gets underway.
Macedo said he needs to create two classrooms for next year’s seventh grade class, and his idea is to take an existing computer lab and convert it into a classroom, which “is really in keeping with the overall movement in the industry to make our tech mobile versus permanent.”
“In fact, if we were considering building a new middle school, I doubt our architect would be proposing building a new lab space,” Macedo said.
The other classroom could be carved out of one of two computer labs in the second floor of the library, Macedo said.
Board member Alison Bedula said Macedo has been “nothing short of a magician” as he’s been asked to fit an increasingly large population “into a fixed amount of space.”
Though he may feel hesitant to ask for resources, Bedula encouraged Macedo to do so as needed.
“We all see the writing on the wall,” she said. “We know education is changing.”
Macedo said that though he is able to switch classroom allocations up year-over-year based on fluctuating grade level sizes, it is a challenge to do so while meeting evolving mandates and still innovating.
“In the near term, which in the life of a school is usually three to five years, I am optimistic even though we continue to be pinched, I don’t see that we are going to be sacrificing the quality of our innovation, nor not being able to meet our mandates,” he said.