Is Your Child in the Right School? (Ep. 172)

There are fewer students now, which makes educators wonder about the future for schools.

Is enrollment going to be down? Maybe, but our classrooms are already overcrowded and the teacher to student ratio is really not so great.

So what does this all mean for the future of schools? If there are fewer kids, maybe smaller schools and smaller classes aren't necessarily a bad thing.

Because it's not like American classrooms have been suffering from an excess of individual attention for our students.

Nationally, there are about 15 students for every teacher.

Here in California, in our public schools, it's closer to 22 students per teacher, and that's not the same thing as class size.

Your child's teacher might have 30 kids in their room because the student-to-teacher ratio includes teachers throughout the whole school, including those who aren't running their own classrooms.

So declining enrollment could create an opportunity for more individual attention for our kids, but there's a catch.

Fewer students means less funding.

Schools are not going to take the same number of teachers and divide them among fewer kids.

Districts are going to cut teachers, combine classes, or maybe even close some schools.

So fewer kids doesn't mean smaller classes.

It might mean fewer teachers for you to choose from.

And this also means your voice can make an impact about how schools look in the future.

School systems are going to change in the next few years.

And this is a particularly important time when your voice does matter.

In some ways, parents have already shown us what this can look like because when the pandemic suddenly took away the school system that we were used to, families did start experimenting.

I saw some great new ideas play out among the patients in my own pediatric practice during the pandemic.

They formed small learning pods.

A few families would get together, and one parent might take on more of the teaching, while another contributed in some other way, like baking or watching the smaller kids.

Other families found online programs or homeschool programs that they wouldn't have thought about before.

And then something interesting happened, as you probably remember.

Schools opened again, and some of the families didn't come back to their traditional school.

I guess in a way they had momentum.

Some of their kids were happier or were learning better, or they liked having flexibility.