Growth of Wascher

Call me a little odd but I am a person who likes to look at numbers.  I typically find that numbers give me the best representation of a given situation.  Over the past couple of months I have been looking at some of the numbers for Wascher Elementary and two simple numbers came to the top: How many Students attend Wascher and How many Teachers provide instruction for those students.

I decided to look back through the state report cards and ODE reports to gather the following information for the past 10 years.  (Unfortunately I have not gathered the information for the current school year yet).

What I see in these numbers is that number of students has increased by 37.5%, growing from 277 in 99/00 to 381 in 08/09.  However, the number of full time teachers has nearly doubled!  In 99/00 there were 13.1 Teachers (FTE) by 08/09 this number increased to 27.5, that is an increase of 96.2%. 

What does that mean for our students?  As you can see the Student per Teacher ratio has dropped from 21.2 down to 14.8.  Lower Student/Teacher ratio translates to more individual instruction and an overall better learning environment for our children.

I have not given you a graph for it but if you go back and read the report cards you will see that student performance has increased at Wascher.  I would make a bet that the lower class size plays a big part in that.