In a school morning in mid-January, The Rye Record took a tour of Rye High School, accompanied by Principal Patricia Taylor and School Board President Laura Slack and Vice President Ray Schmitt. We walked from class to class to see how serious the overcrowding is and how outdated the science classrooms are, the primary reasons for a school bond.

 

By Jim Byrne and Robin Jovanovich

 

In a school morning in mid-January, The Rye Record took a tour of Rye High School, accompanied by Principal Patricia Taylor and School Board President Laura Slack and Vice President Ray Schmitt. We walked from class to class to see how serious the overcrowding is and how outdated the science classrooms are, the primary reasons for a school bond.

 

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A $20 million bond was voted down by the community in December; the Board is now proposing a $16.3 million bond that will be put to a vote March 13.

 

Principal Taylor was our tour guide. We went into the science labs, which are restricted to 24 students for safety reasons. (She noted that the ideal class size as far as faculty are concerned is 24 to 25 students.)While the spaces look the same as they did in the 1960s, we learned that Rye High ranked 34th on the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) test. “The trouble is,” said Ms. Taylor, that in our classes the teachers have to do all the experiments because there is no place for the students to do them.” Some labs have been repaired over and over and have outlived their useful life, she noted.

 

Under the School Board’s expansion plan, two classrooms will be reclaimed, some refreshed and 12 new science classrooms will be built.

 

The new rooms will be flexible and can function from subject to subject. “Last year we offered two classes to encourage engineering. We have a lot of teachers who are engineers,” said Ms. Taylor.

 

New York State requires only three years of high school science, but “you’d be hard-pressed to find a student not taking science for a fourth year here,” said Ms. Taylor. “And only five of our students didn’t take a fourth year of math last year.”

 

In 2007, the Board did their first space study. They realized there were spaces they could capture and they did, but a number of classes are in less-than-ideal spots, such as the “third-floor attic”. Teachers are agreeing to larger class sizes and some now have 30.  

 

With an aging campus with high enrollment — 242 children in the system who will be coming to the high school campus — and school officials agreeing they’ve recaptured and rejiggered every possible space, they feel the need for an addition to the high school is essential.  

 

Will the expansion require more teachers, which mean higher annual budgets? School Superintendent Dr. Edward Shine has said they may need to hire as many as ten teachers in the next ten years.

 

What the tour showed these reporters is that a lot of good things are going on in classrooms, notwithstanding the aging infrastructure. From the point of view of someone who graduated from high school in the late Sixties and another who graduated in 2000, we remember our great teachers more than the classrooms that were spatially challenged. Is there less learning going on in the annex than there is in one of their larger classrooms? Studies show that “there is no scientific link between class size and achievement in middle and high schools.”

 

The Board has done a first-rate job analyzing the shortcomings of the current facility. It is up to the voters to decide on a bond to pay for significant improvements.