Students in the Shoreline School District continued to change classes and teachers this week at the elementary and high schools, after two weeks of classes being shuffled.

At the elementary schools, some class changes that drew fire from parents and teachers were reversed or ameliorated.

For example, a few split classes that were created reverted back to one grade, including the fifth/sixth grade split at Brookside and the first/second grade split at Briarcrest.

Some children got to go back to their old classrooms, and others were placed in new configurations.

There are now seven split classes in the district, down from 10 last week.

Those were building-based decisions, and some of them resulted from enrollment counts that became more final between initial decisions and the end of the month, said Marcia Harris, deputy superintendent.

In addition, the district added more full-time equivalent certificated teachers to help in large classes.

Originally, the district had planned to add seven FTE teachers to elementaries. Now, it plans to add 8.3 FTE teachers, plus a .3 FTE teacher at the Room Nine Community School.

On Sept. 27, teachers and support staff held a one-day strike to protest the changes.

While teachers still have serious concerns, the fact that more staff has been added, and that splits have been reduced, is positive, said Elizabeth Beck, co-president of the Shoreline Education Association, or SEA. a union for teachers and other certificated staff.

The extra help will balance out some class numbers better, which is good, but many are still unbalanced, Beck said.

At the high schools, many students were moved to new sections or had their teachers replaced.

At Shorewood, 120 students had schedules or teachers change. At Shorecrest, the changes affected 66 students.

District officials added five new sections at Shorewood and four new sections at Shorecrest. The sections drew students out of classes that qualified for overload and put them into new ones.

Andy Barker, a Shorecrest teacher, was one of those affected by the changes.

Until Friday, Sept., 28, he taught a section of ninth-grade English. That day, he was told he would no longer teach the class and that his students would have a substitute until a new teacher was hired.

Monday morning, three days later, he faced his new class — Senior Connections, a course for seniors. Barker’s ninth-grade students were upset, he said at the Shoreline School Board meeting Monday, Oct. 1.

“Shuffling kids is a terrible way to treat kids,” he said at the meeting.

“We want to emphasize how typical this is,” said Craig Degginger, district spokesperson, of the high school changes. “This happens every September. This year, it was five sections (at Shorewood) but in 2004 there were nine sections added.”

The intent was to lower class sizes and come up with an even basis for distributing students, Harris said.

At the high schools, classes of 31 to 33 have been reduced to under 30, one to 25 and others to 28 or 29, she said.

Beck said that union leaders had not been given high school class size numbers by the district yet.

“At the high schools it is much more common to have movement of students, though this seems to teachers to be pretty late in the year to be doing those moves,” Beck said. “It seems an incredible amount of disruption for kids, though the motivation is to provide a smaller class size for that Senior Connections class.”

The union is pursuing a grievance over the elementary and high school changes.

At the Oct. 1 board meeting, SEA co-president Pat Valle read a letter from the union to district officials expressing “lost confidence” in their commitment to quality instruction.

She asked that a representative from the teacher’s and support unions and from the PTSA participate on the superintendent’s cabinet to help in budget decisions about the classroom.

“We would love greater participation on a district level in decisions,” Beck said. “Not (just) contract maintenance, but how do we decide where resources are allocated.”

As for further changes, the numbers from the Oct. 1 student count were still being evaluated at press time.

Officials will look at where teachers have reached new levels of overload beyond the staffing that’s already been added, Harris said.

“We will deal with that either through the addition of paraeducator time or paying a stipend to the teacher,” she said.