The population of Wake County has grown rapidly over the past few decades. As the Research Triangle Park has brought more jobs to this area, the population grew to accommodate it. And with new people comes new families, and eventually new kids, which the school system has to build around. However, when schools are built, they usually only plan for the amount of kids currently in the area, and fail to consider the rate of population growth.
This problem has already affected Panther Creek. The school itself was built in 2006, but the influx of new people into the area led to the construction of Mods 1-3 in 2009 and then the addition of mods 4 and 5 in 2013 to make room for new students.
But recently, even relocation of classes to the mods have not been able to accommodate the overcapacity of our school. So this year, more teachers than ever have had to share classrooms in order to ensure a complete schedule for students and a guaranteed place to go for class.
The consequences for this have been felt by teachers and students alike. Many teachers have had to give up their classrooms during their planning period and find a break room or other area to complete work in, which makes setting up lessons and accessing student work more difficult, especially for paper based classes like AP English classes and classes that depend on specialized equipment like science.
Mrs. Wayand, a Forensics and Chemistry teacher at Panther Creek who has been teaching here for nine years, has had her fair share of experience sharing a classroom. “I shared a classroom for my first four years at Panther Creek,” she said. She also clarified: “Last year I shared but I was not the “floating” person; someone came and took over my room during third period, and this is my first year in a long time that I’ve been split between two rooms.”
Even with having to teach in two classrooms, Mrs. Wayand considers herself one of the luckier teachers when it comes to her schedule. “I have a planning period in between the times that I share classrooms,” she explained. “I’m in my classroom during first and second… and I teach in another room during fourth period.”
Another teacher who is sharing a classroom this year is Mr. Huff, who teaches Adobe Visual Design this year. When asked about the root of this issue, overcrowding was the first thing on his mind. As he explained: “We can’t just create new classrooms. We’re facing the fact that we have a lot of students in our area without enough classrooms to put them in.”
Mrs. Wayand expressed similar thoughts, but hopes that the opening of Morrisville High School in the coming years “will maybe make the overall population of our school slightly smaller.” However, she is still not confident that the current situation will change anytime soon. “Until the growth starts getting less or we have less students here,” she said, “I believe we are going to be sharing classrooms for a while… In the end I don’t think we have a good solution to the problem right now unless we change the number of students that we have in the building.”
Hopefully the opening of Morrisville High School will affect the zoning of students to PC, but if not, teachers sharing classrooms will be here to stay.
