30 students in a VUSD classrooom? The teachers are lying!

Vista Watchdog 1 claims to be a former school board member, an ex Marine, and a person whose house there have been many secret meetings with Jim Gibson, Dr. Stephen Guffanti, and Dr. Joyce Bales in attendance.

VWdog's claims must all be taken with a grain of salt as you will read below he does not understand the difference between the total certificated (credentialed) number of employees (a larger number) and the much smaller number of certificated employees who are classroom teachers. Certainly an actual ex-VUSD board member would understand that distinction.

con no more (that's me) said on: January 29, 2010, 11:50 am
VWdog writes about a common confusion regarding student teacher ratios when he posted on January 29 at 5:15am the following: "if you take the most recent enrollment numbers and divide by the currently listed number of teaches you arrive at a student/teacher ratio of about 18/1. Yet, I keep hearing teachers claiming they have classes of up to 30 students"

VWdog is making a mistake because he is not taking into account the difference between certificated personnel and REGULAR classroom teachers.

All classroom teachers are certificated but not all certificated personnel are classroom teachers.

Other certificated personnel who are NOT regular classroom teachers are district administration, principals, vice principals, counselors, psychologists, school nurses, teachers on special assignment (junior administrators who are paid as teachers but have no classroom duties), reading specialists, special education teachers with small case loads and class sizes, etc.

Any school district has many more certificated personnel than they have regular classroom teachers. This fact is why dividing up the number of students by the number of certificated personnel does not reflect the true average number of students in a classroom.

In the past many school districts in California did divide the TOTAL number of certificated personnel by the total number of students to try to show they had small classes in their district. Even though their might be 30 to 40 in regular class rooms, districts could claim a 18 to one student to certificated personnel ratio. District admin likes to try to frame their student teacher ratio in the best possible light. Most parents like small ratios, hence the use of the TOTAL number of certificated personnel rather than the actual number of classroom teaches.