Class Size
A teacher can start to feel overwhelmed easily when their roster is overloaded. Trust me I’ve been there. I was at 25 my second year and didn’t even meet or know 30% of my caseload but still had to write 30 page reports on them and have meetings with their parents never meeting their child. So trust me when I say I’ve been there and it can become easily difficult to create meaningful relationships with every student when there’s too many.
I decided to use Instagram first to ask you all what you think about your caseloads and this is what I saw:
Do you feel like your classroom is overloaded: 43% of followers said yes and 83% said no.
This is awesome! Less than half of followers feel that their class size is an issue which actually did surprise me but I was glad. I know in the past years class size has been a hot topic and something districts every where struggle and work really hard at to maintain so to hear that it is working and happening is great!
Are you compensated if you your district goes over your cap size in your classroom? 17% said yes and 83% said no.
This concept of compensating teachers extra for going over their caseload is a fairly newer concept where I am in California. So I wasn't surprised that it’s not happening everywhere, yet. The best way to check on this if you aren’t sure is to look at your contract and if there isn’t anything in your contract talk to your union rep to see what can be done to change that.
Because I found out that legally districts don’t have to compensate teachers (from what I have researched so far, comment below if you found something else!) . What ends up happening if they are overloaded they then get less funding per every student that they are over the cap with instead. Now I am just talking about California so I have no idea wha the laws and regulations are or how they vary from state to state which would be an even more interesting concept to deep dive into but I will save that for later. Now to the juicy part, what does CA education law say about my class size? Well this is what I found:
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