As the district faces shrinking enrollment of students, some teachers at the high school have empty spots in their schedules. With about 35 fewer incoming freshmen next year for the 24-25 school year, according to administration, there is some worry about how the teachers are handling it.
“It’s scary to think about the numbers. I think it is because our population is shrinking. Then I also think that kids are taking more metal classes, like stuff in the Tech Ed Department and maybe less extra English electives. So, we don’t have as many electives as we would normally have,” English teacher Angela Femali said.
Principal Bryant Bednarek emphasized that he will not lay off any teachers because there are other options to assign duties to staff.
“I am not looking to get rid of teachers. Are there ways we could use our staff more efficiently? Yes, we probably have lower class sizes than we need to have and that’s something we’ll have to take a look at, especially when we go on to next year, or where we can be more efficient with our personnel,” Bednarek said. “We have some teachers who can maybe teach something that they are not teaching right now, so we can use them in different ways, but it is not my intention or belief that we should get rid of any teachers at this time.”
Lower enrollment will affect most departments next year.
“It’s a number of factors. We have a decline in enrollment of people in Berlin. Every class every year is smaller so that obviously has repercussions of the high school enrollment,” Spanish teacher Jairo Granados said. “Then, one of the biggest factors is that a lot of students in the past used to take Spanish because it was required in college and now pretty much all the colleges and universities in Wisconsin, except for UW-Madison, don’t require two years of high school Spanish.”
Because of this, Spanish teacher Jody Ziemann, who is part time this year, she said that she will not be here next year. There are not enough students to keep both of the teachers here at school, so Granados will teach all the Spanish classes.
To keep as many staff as possible, administration says they will assign supervision or substitution duties to teachers who have blank slots in their schedules.
“Next year we are going to use some staff to cover other classes when other teachers are gone, and that will be kind of like their assignments. So, we fill them up with all their teaching duties, and supervision duties throughout the day,” Bednarek said.
Between moving teachers around and having teachers pick up extra duties, they will make everything work.
“Our biggest cost as a district is our teachers, and that’s because they are the most important part of our school district besides the students. Everything that we do starts with the teachers, and without good teachers, we are not going to have a good school district,” Bednarek said.
