Now you know 3 . . .

To continue painting a picture of our current reality related to student housing I will share enrollment by building compared to the enrollment the building was designed to house. Sharing this information with various groups over the last year has resulted in feedback from many that we are not accurately describing how bad our current reality is. This feedback is based on the column in the graph below titled, Tahoma Max Capacity***. By sharing the numbers in this column, we are telling the community that we can continue to place additional students into already overcrowded schools and for some that is a problem. To be transparent, however, I believe that it would be a mistake to change the message that we gave in last spring’s bond documents.

Without getting into the technical discussion of 100% or 85% utilization for buildings housing students in grades 6-12, you can see in the chart that we have more students in all four elementary buildings, the junior high, and the high school than they were designed to house. Using the 100% utilization that is above the 85% norm for secondary schools, we have about 700 more students in our schools than they were designed to hold. If we use the 85% norm for secondary schools that number is over 1000.

How are we able to house these students and still provide a quality program? The answer is the 84 portables that we have on our sites. We have portable classrooms, but many are very old and do not meet the quality of learning environment that we want for our young people and staff. Portables work for classrooms, but placing more and more students into hallways, eating areas, elective areas, and rest rooms results in overcrowding and the problems associated with cramming bodies into tight spaces. We are also in a position where we have little or no capacity to add additional portables on school sites. The chart below shows the number of portables being used to house students and programs in local school districts. No district in the chart is housing more students as a percentage of enrollment then we are in Tahoma.

Our current reality is one of overcrowded schools except at the middle school level, aging portables on all school sites, and enrollment projections showing continued growth over the next decade. At some point we will not be able to house additional students in the same spaces and offer the same program. In my next post I will share more of my thinking on the max capacity identified in the first chart above.