Local school district dealing with growing pains

A local school district is experiencing some growing pains. Jefferson County School District 251 has seen extreme growth resulting in overcrowding.

“Our historical growth has been around 3.1 percent, but in the year 2016-2017 to 2017-2018 we actually grew 5.8% which equates to about 324 kids new to our district,” says Lisa Sherick, Superintendent.

The growth is in all of the schools in the district resulting in 22 classrooms housed in trailers for the middle school.

“The middle school is the largest middle school in the whole state. So we are just bursting,” says Sherick.

Which impacts the learning environment and daily structure.

“We want students to have that one on one experience with their teachers and when you have crowded classrooms you start losing some of that. And another thing we’re experiencing is difficulties at lunch.”

“Very very crowded in the hallways for sure and the lunch line extends, it seems for miles but it’s not miles it just extends really a long way down the hall, it’s phenomenal that we’re able to feed that many students in 30 minutes because each lunch has almost 500 students,” says Sherry Simmons, Principal at Rigby Middle School.

They say it’s not a problem that rezoning will fix.

“We actually have looked at that to see if we can just change boundaries and spread the kids out more if that will be a long-term help to alleviate the growth but it would help for a year or two but not long-term,” says Michele Southwick, Director of Elementary Education.

“We’re going to be running a bond in August with hopes that our patrons will come together and approve us to build some more so we can facilitate the growth,” says Sherick.

If approved the bond the district would build another elementary school and add on to smaller schools.

“That would actually replace Farnsworth elementary and Farnsworth elementary was built as a middle school originally. And so fiscally it makes sense to turn that back into a middle school,” says Southwick.

Until then, the district plans to work with what they have to provide a safe learning environment for students.

The district also says that if the growth continues rapidly they may even outgrow Rigby High School.