Roosevelt STEAM Academy

The teacher/student ratio is completely false. The number given would have to include cleaning staff, lunch staff and secretaries. The actual number of full time teachers is 25, not 44. And the actual number of students is over 460, not 446. That gives a misleading 18.4 : 1 ratio. But that number includes 4 music teachers, a stem teacher, an art teacher and a p.e. teacher, and also two high ability teachers with the smallest number of students in the building.

The lowest number of students in any regular education class at the end of the year in 21-22 is 23 in a kindergarten room. In any other grade, 24 is the minimum. The high at the end of the year is 33. The high during the year was 35. The actual average students per class is more like 28.

The staff is dedicated and works like mad to create a safe, nurturing environment. But the building was approximately 65 staffed this year, and it created a large number of issues. Classes were too large, and had too many personalities that clashed that could not be resolved by splitting students up because there was no place for them to go. The behavior team works constantly to help our most dysregulated students learn to better approach their peers and the world and to interact with it more successfully. However, logistics for going to music, art, p.e. and stem were exceedingly challenging because those class sizes literally do not fit in most of those rooms, so classes had to be parsed out into smaller groups, creating a bottleneck in the hallway that made transitions fraught with opportunities for children to become dysregulated.

Literally every educator in the building, including all members of the administration team, would roll up their sleeves and substitute in classrooms as needed. This is admirable, but the fact that it was necessary meant that many times the support needed for students suffering dysregulation was not available because those people were already teaching full classrooms.

The district never did anything more than posting available jobs on the district site to try to mitigate these problems. 3 members of the school board admitted this in a meeting in the school during the year. Meanwhile, according to this site, staff at North Side Middle School went from 44 to 68. Considering how wrong their numbers are on Roosevelt, take that with a grain of salt. But it shows that hiring or moving personnel appeared to be possible - it simply was not done for Roosevelt in anything close to the needed numbers.