Ramsey IFAC issues with space
Recently I was talking with my sister about her job at Ramsey International Fine Arts Center, a K-8 public school on 49th and Nicollet in Minneapolis that both my sister and attended. The school in more recent years has been steadily failing. There are simply too many kids for the amount of staff in the building and not nearly enough space. My sister, 22 became the sole Spanish translator this year for the third of the student population whose first language (or families primary language) is Spanish. There are relatively few Spanish speaking adults in the building and entirely too many Spanish speakers for this to be acceptable. The relation of Spanish speaking students to adults is not the problem that caught my attention while having the conversation with my sister. What caught my attention was what she said about sixth graders. She said there are classrooms of about 40 sixth graders per teacher. Since I was in middle school there has been talk of lowering classroom sizes and thus optimizing teacher-student relations and enhancing the education of individuals. In my largest class in sixth grade there were 31 or 32 people and everyone was talking about voting for smaller class sizes. That was half a decade ago and the number of student per class has only gone up. Ramsey is an excellent example of a superb school loosing funding and being forced to degrade its programs. There are over 775 families at Ramsey IFAC. It's time tax-payers money start being utilized to help our future. We need to vote for leaders who support kids and are opposed to no-child left behind and other standards testing programs which destroy ultimately hinder teachers from fully teaching their students. I’m voting for kids and for myself. Public schools in Minnesota are failing. It’s a shame that funding for public schools is placed so much lower in priority than a war on terror. We choose to use our money to send our children, our future to get killed by guerilla fighters/terrorists in the middle east instead of choosing to use our money to help our schools.