This year at RHS, overcrowded classrooms have become a more prevalent issue that seems to be troubling students and hindering their ability to learn effectively.

The students currently taking AP Spanish have struggled with this encumbrance in that they are packed in a classroom with 37 other people. Junior Rebecca Schwutke feels that such a large class is a deterrent to her academic education.

“[Overcrowding] has impacted my ability to learn in class in that it distracts me from what the teacher is saying and causes me to not pay attention,” she said.

Senior Liz Lasc, who is also an AP Spanish student, is frustrated with the overflow of students in the class.

“Since we have a bunch of people in our class, it’s kind of hard to listen to the teacher,” Lasc said. “In a big class, if someone talks the volume of the noise spreads and I can’t concentrate. For me, it’s a concentration thing because I hear people in the background whispering and it really does interfere [with learning].”

Despite the drawbacks of an overcrowded classroom, senior Teresa Azzam has found some benefits of having more students in her Spanish class.

“We have more people to share ideas with and have different ideas to contribute to conversations,” Azzam said. “We go pretty in-depth in Spanish, so it’s nice to have different opinions that we can talk about.”

In the past couple of months since school started, these AP language students have seemingly become increasingly discontented with the overcrowding and have come up with potential initiatives to reduce it.

“We could be using more of the classrooms,” Schwutke said. “It’s not as though we don’t have enough teachers, because we do. All we’d have to do is even out the classes and have more of them so we don’t have classes with almost 40 students.”

Azzam believes that dividing the class is necessary in order to give those students who want to take the class a fair opportunity to learn in a more adequate environment.

“You can’t just tell students to drop out [of the class],” Azzam said. “If somebody wants to take Spanish, then they should be allowed to take it. The administration just needs to give us two classes so that we can have smaller sizes and get the speaking practice that we need.”

Although these students have to cope with the crowding right now, they are pushing administration in hopes to start up a second class next semester so they can all have the chance to learn in a more comfortable classroom setting.

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