By Nicholas Brown
Staff Writer

Slow but steady enrollment increases throughout the Hooksett School District, along with recent default budgets and two abnormally large classes, have exercised the creativity of school officials.

While individual class sizes throughout the district are meeting state education standards, the district’s own limits on class sizes are being tested.

“This is the kind of thing the (school) board is always looking at,” said School Board Chairman Joanne McHugh. “I think our approach is always, ‘We have to work smarter.’”

This year’s sixth-grade class alone has 215 students, compared to a typical middle school class, which is in the 160s or 170s, said Cawley Middle School Principal Ron Pedro.

The result is that normal sixth-grade class sizes are ranging from 23 students to 28, according to numbers provided by SAU 15. In each of the four primary academic subject groups, class sizes are exceeding the district’s limit of 25 students per middle school class.

“This year is exceptional in that that bubble has come to meet us in the sixth grade,” said Pedro.

Cawley has a new sixth-grade teacher this year, who Pedro said will follow the class through eighth grade, and then return to sixth grade to help deal with another “bubble” class, the current third grade.

That class is now under the watch of Memorial School Principal Carol Soucy.

Soucy said some of the challenge in trying to keep manageable class sizes comes during the summer, when school officials have to project enrollment numbers.

She said administrators often plan for a 3 percent increase over the previous year’s numbers, but said, “Until school opens, you never exactly know.”

Soucy said she’s comfortable with this year’s individual class sizes -­ which range from 18 to 25 ­ at Memorial.

“Right now I feel good,” she said. “I do not want our fourth grade to grow much more.”

Overall enrollment is also up at Fred C. Underhill School, where class sizes range from 14, in one kindergarten, to 20, in one first- and one second-grade class.

Despite being dealt a default budget in March ­ the district’s second in the last three years ­ the board approved the hire of an additional kindergarten teacher to stave off higher class sizes.

McHugh said added enrollment at Underhill not only makes class size problematic, but also tests the school’s space limitations.

“When you have a default budget, it gets doubly difficult,” she said.

The two most crowded individual classes in the district are the advanced math classes in the seventh and eighth grade. Each has 30 students.

SAU 15 Superintendent Phil Littlefield said 30 students in an advanced class isn’t necessarily problematic, even when another middle school classroom that may have 20 students.

He said class size is largely determined by how teachers can best deliver an education to each student within the classroom.

“This group has 23 youngsters, this group has 20 ­ Why?” said Littlefield, posing a rhetorical question. The answer, he said, “We may know this (smaller) group may have a couple of youngsters that are going to require some additional time.”

Littlefield said some “blips here and there” in current class sizes may yet be attended to. Overall, he said, “These are reasonable class sizes.”