by Breon Thacker and Quaron Walker-Bey

Three years after the grand opening of the new Patterson High School building in 2021, students and teachers are struggling with a shortage of space, leading to a host of problems for the growing school population.

According to a 2015 report on the 21st Century Schools website, the old Patterson building took up 303,582 square feet. By contrast, the new building, which is shared with the Claremount School, was projected to be 267,771 feet total, including both schools. Teachers who remember the old building are glad to have the improvements in facilities and technology but are frustrated with the lack of space and the issues it creates.

“I like the new school building with the new technology, but at the old school building there was more room for students; teachers weren’t on top of each other”, reflects EMT instructor Mr. Casey. Mr. Casey thinks the 21st Century Building program could have planned the switch better. According to Mr. Casey, the building was originally designed for about 1,000 students and we are at or above about 1,300 now. The student population is overcrowded for the size of the building. Also, there is a bandwidth lag in the Wi-Fi system because so many students are on it at once. To compound the problem, there are not enough classrooms for the number of teachers in the building, forcing some teachers to share classrooms with other teachers whose curriculum or subjects are totally different from one another.

Some teachers have to move from classroom to classroom throughout the day, making it difficult to prepare for lessons. World History teacher Mr. O’Neal is one of these teachers. He says that some of the teachers here are very unsanitary, so he has to spend time cleaning up other after classes that aren’t his, and it can make it difficult to plan ahead of time for class. Mr. O’Neal has to switch classrooms every period that he teaches a class. Mr. O’Neal goes on to explain that he has 20-25 students per period and due to the small classroom sizes there is often not enough room for all his students to fit. Frequently kids may have to stand up for a whole class period.

Many staff members and and students share the opinion that the school should have been built larger, with more classrooms and offices and more space overall. Since the past can’t be changed, the question now is how to address this problem going forward. Should the school cap enrollment and try to lower the student population in future school years? Should school leaders seek funding for the building to be expanded? Should Claremount be relocated to a new site so that Patterson can utilize that section of the building? None of these potential solutions seem very viable in the present moment, but the problems caused by the lack of space at Patterson are becoming harder and harder to ignore. Something needs to be done about this issue or it will only get worse.