LEWISTON — School officials said the unexpected surge of 270 new students since opening day is taxing staff, programs, facilities and transportation.
Superintendent Bill Webster attributed the influx to fewer families than normal leaving the city and more than normal arriving. As a result, school administrators are wondering what’s around the corner, he said.
Last December, an outside study projected Lewiston would get 100 more students this fall than last fall. It got 270 more, for a total enrollment of 5,431.
The higher school enrollments are making for congested classrooms, halls, libraries, buses, gyms and cafeterias, even though nine new classrooms were added since last spring.
Last fall, there were 722 students at Montello Elementary School. This fall there are 783.
At Lewiston High School there are 129 more students, at Lewiston Middle School, 31 more, at Longley Elementary, 51 more and at Geiger Elementary, 36 more.
Enrollment is down by 1, 23 and 14, respectively, at Farwell, Martel and McMahon schools. But those schools are full, despite the fact McMahon has a two-year-old 10-classroom wing.
At Montello — one of the largest elementary schools in Maine — there are four lunch periods with nearly 200 students in each one.
On a recent weekday, the cafeteria was loud and busy. A duty aide spoke into a microphone reminding students to get ketchup before they sit down. If she didn’t use the microphone, “no one can hear her,” Principal Jim Cliffe said.
Standing in the lunch line, a few fidgety first-graders swung their arms, brushing each other.
“Boys, come over here,” Cliffe said. “Get your hands to yourself. Let’s sit over here.” After a moment he asked one if he was ready to get back in line. The little guy nodded.
Lots of students means “everybody’s on deck,” Cliffe said, motioning to a custodian who as helping out.
Montello has five additional teachers this year to reduce class sizes. Because of the influx of students, the extra teachers won’t do much to create smaller classes, the superintendent said.
More classes mean higher demands on everything else, such as physical education, the cafeteria, the library, buses and playground supervision at Montello.
“You do the best you can and be positive about it,” Cliffe said.
He and his administrators are supposed to spend time observing teachers to improve teaching. “We end up spending a lot of our time managing kids,” Cliffe said. “My assistant principal is in the cafeteria right now . . . to manage the flow.”
At Lewiston High School, Assistant Principal Jay Dufour said, “We’re doing the best we can.” The influx of students is felt “in the cafeteria at lunch. It’s pretty full.”
The high school has a great, hardworking staff, Dufour said. “We’re adapting,” he said.
The faculty at Longley Elementary is managing an influx there as well, Principal Kristie Clark said.
“It’s made our class sizes a bit bigger, but not to the extent that we can’t handle it,” she said. “We do have extra people on duties, the playground and cafeteria.”
Last year, there was room in Longley’s prekindergarten classes. This year, they are full. And so is the school.
“We are maxed out now,” Clark said.
And, Lewiston principals say, student numbers change daily. A high turnover rate hampers learning, they said.
At Martel Elementary on Lisbon Street, the overall student population is down due to smaller kindergarten enrollments. Still, Martel is crowded with new upperclassmen. The sixth grade classes have 28 and 29 students, while both fourth-grade and both fifth-grade classrooms have 26 students each.
“We’ve just had so many large numbers of kids move in,” Principal Stephen Whitfield said.
The School Department plans to go out to bid soon to build a modular with six classrooms to help ease crowding this fall, Webster said.
Meanwhile, Lewiston is working on building a new elementary school for 900 students in 2019, replacing the aging Longley and Martel schools.
“Student populations have been on the decline for many, many years. So this is unusual,” Suzan Beaudoin, director of School Finance and Operations for the Maine Department of Education, said.
In 2000, there were 211,792 Maine students, she said. By 2014, the number fell to 180,615, despite school systems adding prekindergarten classes.
bwashuk@sunjournal.com
General Assistance applications up
By Kathryn Skelton and Bonnie Washuk, Staff Writers
LEWISTON — City Administrator Ed Barrett was surprised as others to learn that city schools have had a surge of between 250 and 270 students this summer, depending on what day the count is taken.
“We need to do some more poking around to see if we can come up with any more definitive answers,” he said. “We have no good way of keeping track of total population coming in and out. There are so many factors that can influence people’s location choices.”
Part of the answer could be in a spike of first-time applicants to the city’s General Assistance program, who are either refugees, immigrants or asylum-seekers.
The numbers are up, from roughly 120 last year to roughly 160 the first six months of 2015. Barrett cautioned that everyone who applies gets assistance.
“We’d certainly like to know what’s going on and get a little bit better feeling whether this is a one-year anomaly or the beginning of some kind of new trend,” Barrett said. “One of the questions I have is, are we seeing some folks coming to Lewiston from other parts of southern Maine due to cost-of-living concerns.”
The cost of housing is considerably more expensive in the Portland area than Lewiston.
Superintendent Bill Webster said he asked Barrett where are all the new families of Lewiston students are living. “He said he doesn’t know,” Webster said.
It’s hard to know how much housing stock is available in Lewiston, Barrett said. He estimates there are 20 to 30 vacant buildings in town, some of which are being remodeled, some with fates unknown, which makes tracking the vacancy rate difficult.
Lewiston schools are still assessing students and do not yet have English Language Learner numbers. There is no question, Webster said, that ELL numbers are up.
School principals said some of the new students are non-English-speaking immigrants from other countries, but they’re only part of the increase. In the mix of new students are English-speaking U.S. citizens.
The new students have moved from “across town, across the country and across the ocean,” Montello Elementary School Principal Jim Cliffe said. “We have kids who might have been at McMahon, or students from another metropolitan area of the United States or rural Maine.”
“A lot of families we’ve received have been transfers from the rest of Lewiston,” Martel Principal Stephen Whitfield said. “We’ve had more Somali families move in and a sprinkling of everything.”
There have been some sad stories in the mix, Whitfield added. “Divorced families and now they’re living with grandma here. It’s not any one trend. It’s 1,000 stories.”
More students could potentially benefit Lewiston, Barrett said.
“Even today, we hear from employers that they have difficulty finding people with the right skills to take jobs that they have,” he said. “It obviously depends on who these people are, what their intentions are, how well they do in school.”
Also on this page: General Assistance applications up
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