New faces, many changes school starts

Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Lauren Harper was a little apprehensive about starting kindergarten, but her mother Bonnie, gave her the encouragement she needed.

Despite fewer students in the Mountain Home School District, hallways remained heavily congested at many of the city's schools as new and returning students adjusted to their first day of school Monday morning.

As part of a plan unveiled during the previous school year, the district moved ninth graders to the high school, adjusted the junior high school to accommodate seventh and eighth graders, and kept fifth and sixth graders at Hacker Middle School.

The changes reflect steadily declining enrollments in recent years with roughly 430 fewer students signing up during initial registration earlier this month.

Hallways at Mountain Home High School were temporarily crowded as dozens of students lined up around the front office to iron out issues with their class schedules, said school principal Jeff Johnson.

"All in all, things went very well," Johnson said. "Before school, it was a little chaotic with a lot of students trying to get their schedules and figure out where they were supposed to go. After that, I was very impressed on how smooth things ran. The hallways didn't seem much more crowded than last year, and teachers have had nothing but good things to say about how well the students have behaved."

The high school principal urged parents to remain patient as the school irons out problems with class schedules to ease some initial classroom overcrowding.

"That's going to take a few days or so," Johnson said. "We're doing everything we can to modify the class sizes and get them switched out. It's going to be a little more difficult this year, but that's one of our goals."

Mountain Home News for the complete story.

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  • sounds all one sided. What school doesn't have problems at the start of the year with schedule problems?

    -- Posted by yoB on Thu, Aug 27, 2009, at 1:26 PM
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