At Freetown Elementary School in Glen Burnie, nearly 200 seats are empty.
Yet one classroom houses non-English-speaking students, gifted and talented students, and space for concentrated learning.
“Are we overcrowded? Pure numbers ? no. Square footage ? no. But if you look around and see how we educate the children ? then yes, we are,” Freetown Principal Shirley Moaney said.
A proposal before the Anne Arundel County Council to increase school capacity has educators saying empty seats on paper don?t equate to unused space.
“When you get down to the practicality of how a building is really used, there are students who need special education, reading help. … There are a lot of special supports that take up space as well,” said Alex Szachnowicz, the school system?s chief facilities officer.
The plan calls for increasing the capacity ratings and doing away with the complex formula used to calculate school size. Once a school reaches the capacity rating, no new developments would be built.
The premise behind the bill is to create a more accurate school capacity chart, which currently has under-capacity schools ? such as Freetown ? closed to new students and overcrowded schools open to more students, officials said.
In several of Freetown?s classrooms, the pupils are broken into two groups based on their abilities so as not to move too fast or too slow, Moaney said.
“Adding five or six students in a class would not be easy,” Moaney said as noise from a group doing a word exercise could be heard by more advanced childrenreading a textbook.
At Crofton Woods Elementary School, “classrooms” don?t exist; instead, four classes share one large wall-less pod. Roughly one-third of the county?s schools are open-space schools.
There are extra seats at the school, according to school system data, but acting Principal John Barzal said the school has to use portable classrooms outside the building to handle special education and music classes.
“Even if enrollment drops, adding extra bodies doesn?t help that school at all,” said Councilman Ed Reilly, R-District 7, who toured the school last week.
But Councilman Jamie Benoit, D-District 4, co-sponsor of the bill, said principals are “data-driven,” and some keep classroom sizes unnecessarily low.
“The bill doesn?t say you?re getting more students. The school board can react by rebalancing the school population through redistricting,” he said.
The cries of concern appear to have reached the council members behind the proposal, as they have hinted at decreasing the proposed rating to 100 percent.
Officials from the school system and the county planning department have said they would support the bill if the rating was dropped to 100 percent.
“The reality is that it doesn?t make any difference what the number is. … We want everyone to say, ?OK, we can live with this,? ” Benoit said.
