I found the 2022-2023 marketing slideshow from Bay Farm Middle School (on Bay Farm’s own website by the way) and it got me thinking about the argument that has been put forth by some families that the savings to wind down BFMS is NBD and the benefit is so huge for the community that it serves that the money should just be found to keep BFMS as is. Right now BFMS is staffed (excluding administrative staff because that’s probably shared with the Elementary side) with six teachers. I have the slides but I’m not going to bother posting those. It’s broken down thusly:
- 6th grade Humanities teacher
- 7th grade Humanities teacher
- 8th grade Humanities teacher
- 6th grade Math and Sciences teacher
- 7th and 8th grade Science teacher
- 7th and 8th grade Math teacher.
I assume that BFMS works the way that Jr Jets works. Each teacher for each grade has two cohorts and while one cohort is working with one teacher, say Humanities, the other cohort is with the Science and/or Math teacher. The issue with this model for BFMS is because it’s so under-enrolled the costs to run BFMS are so much higher than for other schools because of the cost to pay for the teacher.
I just learned, based on a staff wish list page that the PE teacher is exclusively for the Middle School, so that’s an additional cost for this small school. As a comparison, Wood MS has three PE teachers for 609 kids. Each PE teacher at Wood is responsible for around 200 kids. The PE teacher at BFMS caps out at 137. Lincoln doesn’t have a listing of their teachers but I imagine the ratio is somewhere around Wood’s.
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