In order to accommodate so many students at the girls locker room at Hialeah High School in Miami is being used as a physical education classroom.
It’s dark, and it reeks of too much perfume. Schools can pack as many students as they want into classes like PE - there's no cap. But as teacher Julia Holden explains, there is the issue of space.
“We have to take our exercise steps and use them as chairs to put at the table so everyone can have a seat”, Holden said. “We have to stack them up and share. If they're not standing, then they have to sit on the floor and we're just waiting for all the desks to get moved at this point.”
You may think PE students don't need an actual classroom with desks and chairs. But in Florida, for half of the year gym class becomes a science class. PE students have homework and tests.
“We do nutrition and stress management, and calorie intake and output, they learn the muscles, what they're for, bio-mechanics basically, but we will be in a classroom with 70 students trying to do that”, said Holden.
66 students to be precise. And here's why that's legal. 10 years ago, Florida voters decided to amend the state constitution to create class size limits for subjects considered core classes. But no one defined what a core class was. So a lot of schools thought they had to keep every class under 25 students.
Two years ago, the Florida Legislature downgraded several hundred classes to "extra-curricular" status, which has no class size limits. PE became extra-curricular. So did classes like writing and Spanish, and college-level classes like calculus.
Republican State Senator David Simmons says plenty of college classes have more than 25 students.
“And so if you're taking a college level class in high school, you should be treated as if you are the same as a college student”, Simmons said.
Simmons helped decide which classes have limits. And when he hears about teachers like Julia Holden with close to 70 students at a time, he says the new law wasn't supposed to open the door for that.
Simmons said, “Simply because this constitutional amendment does not deal with extracurricular type of activities then that does not mean that there's a license to act irrationally and ridiculously.”
But at Hialeah High, Principal Verena Cabrera says PE classes are so large because she had to cut two PE coaches in order to hire teachers for subjects where there are class size limits.
“Something really has to give,” said Cabrera. “If you're telling me these classes have to be at 25, then that's the law. I have to make that happen.”
Last year, nearly 30,000 classrooms in Florida couldn't make that happen. They had more students than the state allows. And even though subjects like writing and calculus don’t have class size limits, Cabrera tries to keep them small anyways.
“I love small class sizes,” said Cabrera. “I think that's key. It's one of the factors that impact student achievement the most. But you have to fund them.”
The state can put down any mandate it wants, she says. That doesn't mean schools will have the resources to follow the law.
