As most of up you know, I have moved to first grade this year. At first I was forced to move due to allocation and the decision of my boss, but then I came to an understanding, got over myself, accepted it and have grown to love the change. With the placement of students from kindergarten group into first grade, I ended up with about half my students from last year. They are good kids, mean well despite some home lives and we understand each other. They know me and my expectations of them and my rules, and I know them, their family lives, what I can expect of them and what they want to expect from me. I consider myself to be lucky because I love all my kids and I think we have a good community vibe amongst all of us. However, I do have 20 students and that is two over the SAGE limit (18).
SAGE is when your school is over 70% poverty all classrooms K-3 are 18 or under. It used to be 15, then it was 16, and now the limit is 18. The idea behind it is good because when we have a higher poverty school - which means more social, emotional, behavioral and trauma experienced children - we need a smaller teacher to student ratio so we can do our best to meet those needs of each and every student.
At the beginning of each year we have what is called a "third-Friday-count." It is exactly what it says: the third Friday in September the district does a count of all the kids in each grade in each school (all 44 elementary, 8 middle, and 5 high school). Based on those numbers, they allocate (distribute) that amount of teachers at each school. Sometimes they have to add or take away teachers depending on the number of teachers already there. For example, if a school had 15-16 students in 2 classrooms at 3rd Friday, they would decide that for the rest of the year there would only need to be 2 classrooms - no extra teachers. On our third friday count we had 17-17-16 in each first grade classroom (3 classrooms). With the limit at 18 those numbers are a bit high because our transient/mobile numbers are usually very high throughout the year. We gain and lose students every first of the month....all year...
So in summary so far, our numbers are reaching SAGE limit at third Friday count and the district decides to keep us where we are. We are thankful we did not lose any teachers. Little did we know, that from September until now we would be WAY OVER....in more ways than one...
