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It's no secret that our Rider family is growing. From crowded halls to the conversion of flex spaces into classrooms, this enrollment increase is resulting in significant opportunities and challenges for our community. Let's explore how this growth is affecting students, teachers, and St. Johns as a whole.
Roosevelt currently has more than 1500 students enrolled, far above the projected growth for the 2022-2023 school year. I sat down with our principal Dr. KD Parman to talk about this exciting time. Our administration acknowledges the difficulties students had adjusting to a new normal school routine. “Last year was hard in a lot of ways, and spending a year with each other, getting to know each other, that’s the biggest piece.”
Since the beginning of the pandemic, total student enrollment has increased by 30%. This could be due to a variety of factors. Benson High School is currently being remodeled, and students attending Benson have been relocated to the Marshall campus, nearly a 2 hour bus ride from North Portland. According to Dr. Parman, “That’s a really hard sell if I know Benson’s gonna be that far away for 3 of my 4 years. It’ll be interesting to see if some students transfer back to Benson next year because it’ll be the last year of their remodel.” Another factor contributing to our growth is that the area immediately surrounding Roosevelt is one of the last affordable places in Portland to buy a home. Lastly, “We have a good reputation across the district of serving students, and the secret is out that Roosevelt is doing good things.”
Not to say we haven’t experienced challenges in our growth. In the words of Dr. Parman, “We’ve gone from a small family dinner to a family reunion.” Many students have dealt with crowded hallways during the passing period this school year, especially in the center stairwell to the west of the commons. “The hallways during passing time is always something we’re looking at because there’s that big bottleneck in the center stairwell. We’re definitely urging students to use the outer stairwells because they’re not quite as busy. "
A change especially affecting students this year is the conversion of flex spaces into classrooms. Flex spaces have historically been used by students to study and learn in accommodating environments that include comfortable furniture, whiteboards, and projectors. Unfortunately, the administration “…just got to the point where we wouldn’t be able to offer programs especially for our… more intensive needs students, and it’s great that the district was able to so quickly get those walled in so that we could use them as small learning spaces, as office spaces for our community partners, it’s been a really nice addition.” This change was necessary to keep our class sizes as small as possible. Another addition keeping class sizes small is the completion of a new building on the North end of the Roosevelt campus last November.
This increase in students has come with an increase in funding, positively impacting students at RHS. “We have a lot more opportunity to expand our elective offerings, which is great. Our CTE programs have doubled in size.” This expansion can be seen in the introduction of the creative writing class this year, which is a course that English teachers at Roosevelt have been advocating for. This was only made possible because of the hiring of more staff. The creative writing class has a Literature magazine, which I highly recommend giving a read.
Whether it’s having more students, more electives, or more space, Roosevelt High School is changing. Students are benefiting from the opportunities brought to RHS through our continued enrollment explosion. While this growth may create challenges, they are nothing we can’t overcome together as a school community.
By Bobby Hamblin
Roosevelt High School
Published October 13, 2022
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