School registration is on rise the past few years District will have 25 per class in many elementary schools BY TOM CAIAZZA Staff Writer On the wall outside the office of the Edison School District's director of enrollment is a sign calling laughter a surefire way to stay young. If that's true, the amount that John Russell laughs would put him at about 5 years of age. He has to laugh, he says, he's too busy not to. Russell and his team in the enrollment office are the first responders to the growth of Edison's schools. In the past two weeks, arguably the busiest weeks of the year for the enrollment office, Russell has been overseeing the registration of new students, hundreds of new students. "We have been seeing 40 to 50 new registrations a day," Russell said of the last few weeks of August, also known as "crunch time." Many parents waited until the final days of the summer to register their children for school before the year begins this week. The weeks leading up to Labor Day have become so hectic that Russell said they have instituted an appointment policy just to spread the registrations out. Opening the doors of the enrollment office at 9 a.m., Russell said, means that all those people will come at that time. At least, by appointment, they can space the registrations out in 15-minute intervals. The constant stream of new registrants this late in the summer means that Russell's team and John DiMuzio, personnel director for the district, have precious little time to process the registrations and make the required movement of teachers to accommodate the students and where they will matriculate. Luckily, they may have seen this coming. The trend in growth for the Edison School District is nothing new. The district has seen increased enrollment for years, and current projections estimate that the district's total population is bound to surpass 15,000 by 2010. Data for the past two years, in fact, have been reasonably accurate in predicting how many students the district will have for the coming year. "We have been within 50 to 60 each year," DiMuzio said. The district has climbed over the past five years by more than 1,000 students, putting it somewhere in the low 14,000s, though more precise numbers for this year's total could not be ascertained by press time. Russell said that in the past two years, the number of new registrations has been roughly around 1,600 over the course of the year. They are not expecting a decrease this year. DiMuzio said this trend has caused issues regarding class sizes - they are getting bigger. At least one grade in each of the township's elementary schools will approach the 25-students-per-class maximum that the district puts in place, except Lincoln Elementary. As of Aug. 28 of this year, there were 17 different instances where the class size in a particular grade or grades would exceed 23 students on average. Some have even hit the 25-student mark. Through all this, DiMuzio insists the quality of education will not change. "In Edison, no matter what happens and no matter what these class sizes are, the education is going to be exactly the same," DiMuzio said. DiMuzio said that the district has long tried to keep class sizes below 25. "We realize 25 is a large number," DiMuzio said. "But unfortunately, when budgets go down, class sizes increase." In April the voters defeated the second school budget in as many years, and with it, denied a bond referendum that would have put additions on a dozen of the district's buildings. DiMuzio said he hopes the voters will see some of the other additions put on other schools and will pass the next bond referendum. "If people at Woodbrook [School] or the people at Menlo Park [School] see what John Marshall looks like, they might say yes," DiMuzio said. Superintendent of Schools Carol Toth said the schools in the district were not built to accommodate the number of students the district has, or will have, in the coming years. In talking about Woodbrook in particular, Toth said it will have about 60 more students than it did last year. "All the schools were built to be community schools," Toth said, "within walking distance in the neighborhood. She [Woodbrook] was not built to handle 800 students." The reason behind the growth is a two-pronged issue - too many houses, too much success. DiMuzio said that in some areas of the township, there are multiple houses being built where only one house previously stood. "If you look at any piece of property," DiMuzio said, "they are taking a house down and they are putting two houses in. That has a definite effect on enrollment with the Board of Ed." There is also the attraction that Edison schools have notoriously gotten from the outside. People tend to move there for the schools, DiMuzio said. The forecast for this year is not too dim, though. "We can get by this year," DiMuzio said.