Children on the playground of Paul Revere Elementary School can look up and see the Matterhorn at Disneyland, "the happiest place on Earth." But at Paul Revere and other schools near the Magic Kingdom, conditions are not so conducive to happiness.
The 23 schools in the Anaheim City School District are so overcrowded, they have been forced to use year-round, multi-track schedules. Class size reduction for first and second grades was accomplished only after adopting double sessions. Even with morning and afternoon sessions - or shifts - there are hours where both shifts of students overlap.
At Paul Revere Elementary in Anaheim, Diana Awadalla (left) and Anne Badin try to teach two classes in the same room for a portion of the day.
At Paul Revere, for example, one session goes from 7:45 a.m. to 1:05 p.m., and another group attends school from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. During the overlap - 10:30 to 1:05 - average-sized classrooms accommodate two teachers and 40 students at a time. Teachers with 40 kids packed into one room say it's a small, small world in which to teach.
Designed to accommodate 700 students, Paul Revere has 1,200. But siblings attending the same school may have different tracks, different vacations and different school starting times.
In addition to being crowded, schools in the Anaheim City School District are old. The average age is 43.
The 240 portables represent 59 percent of all classrooms.
Only one school in the district has a covered lunch area, and only one has an auditorium. Without cafeterias and multipurpose rooms, assemblies are held outside, weather permitting. Conditions are so crowded that, much like Disneyland in high season, there are long lines for bathrooms, meals and drinking fountains.
To accommodate the masses of students, there are several lunch sessions.
Lunch starts at 10:20 a.m. for Paul Revere students, who get 20 minute shifts in the outdoor lunchroom.
At Paul Revere, lunch begins as early as 10:20 in the morning, with other shifts scheduled to eat at 10:45, 10:50, 11:10, 11:30, 12:15 and 12:40. To shorten the school day and handle overcrowding, recess was eliminated for children in the younger grades. Instead, a 20-minute lunch period is combined with a 20-minute physical education period. Youngsters ages 5 and 6 study core subjects for three consecutive hours, without so much as a bathroom break scheduled.
Maria Garcia, a fourth-grader eating her lunch with hundreds of other students at packed picnic tables, looked around and explained the situation from a child's point of view. "There are just too many kids here, and it's very hard to know everybody."
"It's very hectic in Anaheim," says Suzanne Toms, president of the Anaheim Elementary Education Association (AEEA). She teaches at a campus that consists entirely of portables. "People walk around on campus and you're not sure who they are. Typically, there are gaps when teachers don't see their fellow teachers for months at a time. Some are off-track and others are on-track. There are only a few days out of the year when the whole staff is together at the same time."
For the most part, students living in the shadow of Disneyland live in poverty. At least 82 percent of Anaheim students are at or below the poverty level. Most are Hispanic. Approximately 62 percent speak limited English or none at all.
Anaheim attracts mostly immigrants for service jobs in hotels and other Disneyland-related businesses. Since the mid-'90s, the school district has been growing by 700 to 900 students a year. Since 1992, enrollment has increased by more than 7,500 students.
"No one designed the school district to operate under such conditions," says Toms. The surging student population is not from new housing; it comes from multiple families crowding into existing housing. A three-bedroom unit is likely to house three or more families. Anaheim schools are expected to grow even more crowded as Disney's expansion plans - 4,800 hotel rooms - require new service workers to maintain them.
A student playing on the cracked pavement at Paul Revere appears to aim his ball at the tip of Disneyland's Matterhorn.
To deal with the massive overcrowding, the Anaheim City School District attempted to pass a $48 million bond in 1998 for both construction and modernization needs. Despite winning a clear majority - 55.5 percent - the bond failed to overcome the two-thirds vote requirement.
Disneyland, which draws the service industry employees to the area, chose not to get involved in the bond campaign. Disneyland was asked to contribute money to the campaign, but declined to do so, according to Anaheim School Superintendent Roberta Thompson.
The district, which is eligible to build 11 new schools based on its student population, would have to build one school a year to keep up with the projected increases alone. Presently, the district has 10,000 students over capacity.
The district has access to $48 million (and has used $27 million of that so far) from Prop. 1A funding allocated to the district because it tried to pass a local bond measure and qualifies as a "hardship" case. The money will be used for expansion at several school sites, including Paul Revere.
However, the Prop. 1A money granted to the district is just a drop in the bucket. The district needs a whopping $189 million to meet the needs of its present and future students.
As a condition for receiving Prop. 1A hardship money, the district has to hold another school bond election within three years of its last attempt. Anaheim school staff are hoping that Prop. 26, the Let's Fix Our Schools initiative, will be approved by voters in March, making things much easier during the next election.
Under Prop. 26, school bonds would no longer need a two-thirds super-majority - or 66.7 percent of the vote - to pass. And districts like Anaheim would have a better chance of getting desperately needed funds to build and repair school facilities.
When asked if district staff is campaigning for the CTA-sponsored Prop. 26, Superintendent Thompson replied, "Is the sky blue? It's one of the easiest decisions we had to make. Majority rule is one of our basic democratic principles, and it's time that law was put into place for school bonds."
Meanwhile, until relief comes, AEEA members make the best of extremely challenging conditions. "We're like Gumby; we have to be flexible," jokes Toms.
First-grade teachers Mindy Hatch and Nicole Hall, whose classes at Paul Revere overlap, try to make the best of the time in which they share a classroom with 40 students.
"There's no space to put materials," says Hatch. "The noise level is extremely high. It's not easy."
"It's difficult trying to meet the needs of all students," says Hall. "With 40 kids, there's so much noise and activity that it can be difficult to provide attention on a one-to-one basis. With so much going on, it can be difficult to hold their attention. These kids have just turned 6, and this is the age where they are learning how to concentrate. It's even harder for Mindy's kids. They don't start their hard-core curriculum until 1 in the afternoon when most 6-year-olds are ready for a nap. It's really crazy."
Even when teachers sharing a classroom try to teach the same subject, it is not always possible. They often find themselves competing not only for space, but also for the children's attention.
"Overlap has a big impact on kids," says Elaine Krueger, who teaches afternoon kindergarten at Franklin Elementary School. "They are very easily distracted. How do you teach them to focus and concentrate when you have one group of students writing, and another group of students chanting a poem?"
"I truly believe that reading scores were lower in my room as a direct result of staggered sessions and overlap," says Cathy Rodriguez, a second-grade teacher at Westmont who worked hard on the last school bond election. "Last year my kids had a five-hour day with one and a half hours of overlap. I had from 7:45 to 10:30 in the morning to teach reading and math. That's not enough time for a teacher to do a good job."
Overlap also makes it very difficult for teachers to be well organized, says first-grade teacher Jackie Diaz at Franklin. "I had no room in my classroom, so I tried to eliminate my desk," she relates. "I put all my supplies in the cupboard. Eventually, I asked for my desk back, because I needed more space. It was hard to live out of a cupboard."
But nothing is as hard as being a "rover," or a teacher who goes from classroom to classroom every month. In Anaheim, every grade level has at least one or two roving classes. When other teachers go off-track for a month, rovers move their classes into the available space. Similar to the homeless on city streets who keep all their worldly possessions in a shopping cart, the rover has a cart for teaching materials, which can be pushed from class to class.
"It's a unique experience," says Paul Revere rover Valerie Gabriel. "When I go into someone else's room, I'm not able to create the environment I want to create. I'm always putting things up and taking them down. You always have to be conscious that it's someone else's space, and you have to leave it the way they left it. When you're always moving and packing up, it takes away from instructional time."
With district sites stretched to the breaking point, and future growth looming on the horizon, AEEA members say business cannot continue as usual.
"The public needs to be aware of what's going on," asserts Paul Revere teacher Anne Badin. "Teachers must do what we can to get public support for the Let's Fix Our Schools campaign. We need to let the public know that we need their support in making it possible to pass school bonds. We can't wait any longer."
