RHAM Class Size in Context

Regional School District 8 · Direct measurements, peer comparison, and trajectory

A personal report by Scott Sauyet · scott@sauyet.com · Not an official Region 8 document

Report compiled April 27, 2026, for use in deliberations on the FY 2026–27 Region 8 budget. High school and middle school class-size figures for 2025–26 are computed directly from RHAM master schedule extracts dated February 15, 2026 (HS, 607 rostered sections) and the 2025–26 Middle School Team and Unified Arts schedule. Peer-district figures are drawn from the Connecticut Mirror “YourSchool” 2012–13 dataset (the most recent year with comparable, publicly available per-school class-size data) and from the National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data 2024–25 release for current student/teacher ratios. RHAM historical staffing figures come from the Region 8 FY 2018–19 Superintendent’s Budget Proposal and the FY 2025–26 Administrative Budget Presentation. All figures are presented as found; methodology, caveats, and known data gaps are described below.

Introduction

Why this report exists¶

A recurring claim in this year’s budget conversation is that RHAM’s class sizes have become “stunningly low” relative to peer districts and historical norms, and that the difference represents an opportunity for cost reduction without instructional harm. That claim is partly right and partly wrong, and it matters which part is which.

This report tries to answer three questions, in order:

1. What are RHAM’s actual class sizes today, measured directly from the master schedule?
2. How do those compare to peer Connecticut secondary regional districts — both historically and today?
3. How did RHAM get here from its 2012–13 baseline?

The short version of the answer: yes, RHAM’s classes are smaller than they used to be, and yes, RHAM is on the richer end of staffing among its peer group — but only modestly. The “stunningly low” framing relies almost entirely on a single misleading number (a teacher-eye, all-classes-included average of 9.82 students); when measured the same way other districts measure their own class sizes, RHAM’s typical core-academic classroom holds about 13 students from a teacher’s perspective and about 14 from a student’s. The bigger story — and the one the data supports cleanly — is that RHAM’s enrollment fell 36% over thirteen years while staffing fell only about 25%, and that this gap, rather than any deliberate decision to enrich staffing, is what produced today’s small classes.

Reading the numbers

A note on methodology before the numbers¶

There are three honest ways to count class size, and they give very different answers. All three appear in this report.

View A — All classrooms. Every section that meets in the master schedule, including “Math Lab,” “Writing Lab,” “Tutorial,” study halls, and one-on-one specialized supports. This is the broadest possible denominator and produces the smallest average. It is also the number most often quoted in casual conversation, because it is the simplest to compute: total enrolled seats divided by total sections. RHAM HS at View A in 2025–26 is 9.82 students per section.

View B — Excluding support and intervention periods. This removes the 130 sections at the high school that exist specifically because a small group of students needs targeted help (Math Lab serving 1–3 students, for instance, is doing exactly what it’s funded to do). What remains is the population of “real” classrooms a typical student would sit in. RHAM HS at View B is 12.16 students per section.

View C — Core academic only. English, math, science, social studies, and world languages — the courses every student takes and the courses most directly comparable across districts. RHAM HS at View C is 12.75 students per section.

A second methodological wrinkle is the difference between teacher-eye and student-eye averages. A teacher-eye average is the simple mean of section sizes: add up all the section sizes and divide by the number of sections. A student-eye average is size-weighted — it asks, “what is the average class size experienced by a student?” — and is computed as the sum of (size × size) divided by the sum of sizes. Because larger classes contain proportionally more students, the student-eye average is always at least as large as the teacher-eye average, and the gap between the two is itself a useful measure of how unevenly classes are distributed. RHAM HS in core academic subjects has a teacher-eye mean of 12.75 and a student-eye mean of 14.28: a typical student sits in classes averaging about 14, while a typical teacher teaches sections averaging about 13.

The Connecticut Mirror data from 2012–13, which is the only year offering apples-to-apples per-school class-size figures across the state, uses something close to View B teacher-eye for its “average class size.” That is the metric used for all peer comparisons below. Section counts and student headcounts are taken directly from RHAM’s PowerSchool extracts, so the within-RHAM figures are direct measurements rather than estimates.

Direct measurement

Part 1 — RHAM today, by direct measurement¶

RHAM High School, 2025–26 ✓ Confirmed from master schedule, 2/15/26¶

The high school’s PowerSchool roster on February 15, 2026 contained 607 sections. After consolidating 35 concurrent groups (where one teacher teaches multiple course numbers in the same room at the same time — Latin I and Latin II together, for instance, or three small CTE sections sharing a shop), the actual number of distinct classroom-meetings is 564.

The gap between View A and View B is large because RHAM runs 130 support sections — Math Lab, Writing Lab, Tutorial, Resource periods, and one-on-one specialized instruction — that are deliberately tiny, often serving 1 to 3 students. These are not lightly attended electives; they are intentional small-group interventions for students who need them, funded as part of the special education and Title-style support framework. Including them in the mean produces View A’s 9.82, but anyone using that figure to argue that the typical RHAM classroom holds ten students is making an arithmetic mistake. The typical core-academic classroom holds about 13 students from a teacher’s perspective and about 14 from a student’s.

Within the core academic subjects, the per-department breakdown looks like this:

Social studies is consistently the largest department in average section size, at over 16 students per class from the student perspective. Science is the smallest, reflecting both physical lab-room constraints and a wide range of advanced-level offerings (AP Physics, AP Biology, anatomy electives) that draw small enrollments.

RHAM Middle School, 2025–26 ✓ Confirmed from master schedule¶

The middle school schedule contains 293 classroom-meetings. The top-line views are:

The middle school’s View A student-eye mean of 16.73 is materially inflated by two outlier ensembles — chorus (88 students in one section) and band (48 students in one section). Both meet daily and are scheduled as single sections by design. They pull the all-classes student-eye mean upward while having essentially no effect on what the median student experiences in their core academic classes, which is a class of about 14.

Per-subject breakdown in the middle school’s core:

Math at the middle school has the widest range of any core subject — section sizes from 5 to 24 — reflecting both the sheltered “Reading” small-group sections and the larger heterogeneous-grouped 8th-grade math sections.

The convergence to note: in core academic subjects, the high school student-eye mean is 14.28 and the middle school student-eye mean is 13.96. Both schools land at roughly fourteen students per class for the typical student in their typical academic classroom. That is the honest answer to “what is RHAM’s class size?”

Peer comparison

Part 2 — Peer comparison¶

The 2012–13 baseline ✓ Confirmed for 8 of 9 peers¶

Connecticut Mirror’s “YourSchool” project, published in 2014, captured a per-school class-size figure for nearly every Connecticut high school for the 2012–13 school year. It is, as best I can determine, the last year for which a single, publicly available, methodologically consistent snapshot of high school class sizes exists across all of Connecticut’s secondary regional districts. CT Mirror’s “average class size” appears to correspond closely to View B (teacher-eye mean, excluding most support periods) — that is, the same measurement school administrators typically use when discussing class size internally.

The peer group used here is every Connecticut secondary regional school district that operates a high school: nine districts in total. Eight of the nine have 2012–13 figures published; Lyme-Old Lyme High School’s data was apparently not collected or not published, and CT Mirror’s page for the LOL HS has the class-size field empty. The other eight, sorted from smallest to largest 2012–13 average class size:

Peer median: 17.6 students. Peer mean: 17.5 students. Range: 14.7 to 20.9.

In 2012–13, RHAM ranked fifth of eight reporting peers — essentially at the median. RHAM was very slightly above the peer median (18.0 versus 17.6) but well within the cluster of similar districts. Anyone arguing that RHAM has historically run unusually small classes is contradicted by this data: thirteen years ago, RHAM’s classes were average for its peer group, slightly larger than half of the schools it is most often compared to.

The 2012–13 Connecticut Mirror data also captures middle school grade 7 average class size for districts that operate a separately-housed middle school. The peer set here is smaller (since some regional districts combine 7–12 in one building), and the comparison is RHAM Middle School against five peer middle schools:

In 2012–13 RHAM Middle School had the second-largest average class size in this peer group. Only John Winthrop MS in Region 4 was running larger classes. The 21.6 figure is worth holding in mind as the report turns to today’s middle school class size of about 14: this represents a roughly 35% drop, the largest decline in any of the metrics in this report.

Today’s staffing ratios — NCES Common Core of Data, 2024–25 ✓ Confirmed¶

The 2012–13 class-size data has not been recollected at the same level of granularity for any subsequent year, so a direct apples-to-apples comparison of today’s class sizes across all peer districts is not possible. What is available, and what the peer districts themselves report to the federal government every year, is the student/teacher ratio: total enrollment divided by classroom teacher FTE.

Student/teacher ratio is a coarser measure than class size, because it counts every classroom teacher (including the ones who staff small support sections) against every student. A district that staffs heavy intervention support will report a lower student/teacher ratio without that necessarily reflecting smaller core-academic classes. But the ratio is consistently reported and consistently audited, and over a peer group it is a reasonable proxy.

Peer median: 9.61. Peer mean: 9.76. RHAM: 9.31. Connecticut statewide HS ratio: 12.3.

RHAM ranks third from the bottom (most richly staffed) of nine peer districts on this measure today. The two schools with richer ratios are Parish Hill (a very small 7–12 building where staffing minimums dominate) and Housatonic Valley (a small rural high school in the northwest corner of the state). Among peers of comparable size, RHAM is staffed marginally more richly than the median, by about 0.3 students per FTE. To put that gap in concrete terms: at RHAM’s current enrollment of 714, the difference between RHAM’s ratio of 9.31 and the peer median of 9.61 is approximately 2.4 teacher FTE.

What three peer districts say publicly today¶

Three of the nine peer districts make affirmative public statements about their current class sizes on their own websites:

• Housatonic Valley Regional HS: “Our classes average 15.” Their 2012–13 figure was 15.4. Their stated class size today is essentially unchanged from thirteen years ago, even though their enrollment fell 28% over the same period (428 students in 2013–14 to 308 today). HVRHS is the cleanest demonstration in this dataset of a district that absorbed enrollment loss by reducing staffing proportionally.

• Lyme-Old Lyme HS: “Average 12 to 15 per class.” This is a range, not a point, and LOL is the one peer for which I was unable to locate 2012–13 class-size data, so I cannot compare directly. The midpoint of 13.5 is below RHAM’s current 12.75 teacher-eye core-academic mean — though only barely, and the comparison is complicated by the fact that LOL’s enrollment has also fallen (16% over five years, while their teacher count has actually grown 5% over the same period — a more aggressive version of the same dynamic that produced RHAM’s small classes today).

• Northwestern Regional HS: “Average class size in academic program is 20.” Their 2012–13 figure was 17.3. This is the only peer in the data that appears to have meaningfully grown its class size over the period, presumably by cutting staff faster than its enrollment fell.

These three points give us a reasonable bracket: the peer schools that talk publicly about class size today report numbers ranging from 12–15 (LOL) up to 20 (NWR), with the most directly comparable case (HVRHS — small rural CT regional HS that lost a lot of enrollment) sitting at 15. RHAM’s 14 student-eye core mean is inside that bracket, on the low end of it but not an outlier.

Trajectory

Part 3 — How RHAM got here: enrollment, staffing, and the gap between them¶

Enrollment ✓ Confirmed from RHAM 2018–19 budget book and NCES¶

The RHAM FY 2018–19 Superintendent’s Budget Proposal contains a full enrollment history compiled from NESDEC (New England School Development Council) projections and October 1 head counts. The relevant rows for the high school and middle school are:

The high school has lost approximately 36% of its enrollment from the 2012–13 baseline (1,145 to ~720) and approximately 39% from its 2010–11 peak (1,172 to ~720). The middle school has lost roughly 44% from its 2012–13 figure (627 to 354). These are large declines by any standard, and they happened without major district-level disruption — neither school closed, course offerings have stayed broadly intact, and the 7–12 building footprint is unchanged.

Staffing ✓ Confirmed from 2018–19 budget book and 2025–26 budget presentation¶

RHAM’s own budget documents make the staffing trajectory unusually traceable. The FY 2018–19 budget book breaks out FTE positions in detail; the FY 2025–26 budget presentation summarizes the year’s net staffing changes. Combining those with current NCES counts gives the picture below.

The 2018–19 budget book narrative is explicit: “In response to declining enrollment, over the past two years the district has reduced the number of FTEs by 9.0 plus a 1.0 administrative assistant at the middle school.” That places the district at roughly 265 total FTE in 2015–16 and roughly 255 in 2017–18 — a reduction of about 10 positions across two years against an enrollment that was still falling.

The same budget book proposed cutting another 12 FTE in 2018–19, bringing the district from 255 to 243. The high school certified teaching staff alone fell from 104.8 to 97.8 in that single year (a reduction of 7.0 FTE), achieved through retirements and elimination of “sixth assignments” — the practice of asking some teachers to teach a sixth period beyond the contractual five.

Today RHAM HS reports 76.7 classroom teachers to NCES. The NCES “classroom teachers” definition is narrower than the budget book’s “certified positions” line — it excludes school counselors, psychologists, social workers, speech/language pathologists, and media specialists, all of whom appear in the budget book. The roughly 21 FTE difference between the budget-book “certified positions” line in 2017–18 (104.8) and the current NCES classroom-teacher count (76.7) is partly that definitional difference and partly real reduction. A direct year-over-year comparison within the budget-book definition is not available without subsequent budget books, but the implied trajectory is clear: the high school’s actual classroom-teaching staff has fallen meaningfully since 2018, just not as fast as enrollment.

The gap¶

Combining the enrollment and staffing numbers tells the central story of this report:

The arithmetic: if RHAM had cut classroom teachers exactly proportionally to enrollment loss, today’s classes would average roughly the same size as in 2012–13 — about 18 students. They average 12 because staffing fell more slowly than enrollment did. That gap — approximately 12 to 17 percentage points between enrollment decline and teacher-FTE decline — is the entire mechanism producing today’s smaller classes.

This is not a story about deliberate enrichment of staffing. It is a story about a district that responded to a sustained enrollment decline by cutting some staff every year, but at a slower rate than enrollment. The result was smaller classes, but the smaller classes were a byproduct of the trajectory rather than an explicit choice.

The 2025–26 budget continues the same pattern. The proposed personnel changes for next year are: +3 Safety/Security Officers, +1 Athletic Trainer, -1 World Language Teacher, -2 Special Education Paraeducators, -1 Math Teacher. The net change in headcount is zero. The net change in teaching headcount is -2. Enrollment is projected to continue declining. Without any policy change, the same dynamic — staffing falling slower than enrollment — will reproduce itself, and class sizes will drift slightly smaller again.

At a glance

Summary table¶

Analysis

Key Observations¶

The peer comparison data does not support the strongest version of the “stunningly low class sizes” claim. RHAM’s high school was at the peer median in 2012–13 and is moderately richer than the peer median today, by a small margin in student/teacher ratio. The figure most often cited — the 9.82 teacher-eye View A average — overstates the gap because it gives equal weight to one-on-one tutoring sections and full classroom-teaching sections.

The honest version of the claim is more modest: RHAM has slightly more teachers per student than the median peer secondary regional district, by a margin that has grown gradually over thirteen years as enrollment fell faster than staffing did. That gap is real and worth discussing in budget conversations — but it is small, and it sits well inside the year-to-year variation that any district experiences as positions are added or eliminated through retirement and attrition.

The middle school has changed more than the high school. RHAM MS in 2012–13 ran the second-largest classes in its peer group; today it runs classes about a third smaller. If there is a place in the district where the staffing-to-enrollment trajectory has produced an outlier worth examining specifically, it is the middle school rather than the high school.

The 2025–26 proposed budget continues the long-running pattern: enrollment declining, total FTE roughly flat, classroom-teacher FTE declining slightly. The proposed personnel changes net to zero on headcount but represent a substitution of non-instructional positions (safety officers, athletic trainer) for instructional ones (math teacher, world language teacher, two SPED paras). Whether that substitution is the right call is a judgment about district priorities; what it is not is a structural reduction in district staffing relative to enrollment. Without policy change, current trends will continue to produce slowly shrinking classes.

A final honest framing: small classes are not free, and they are not unambiguously good or bad. Smaller classes are a real instructional benefit, particularly for struggling students; they are also a real recurring cost to taxpayers in three towns. The case for adjusting staffing toward the peer median is a budget case, not an instructional case. The case for holding current staffing is an instructional case, not a budget case. Both are legitimate; the data above should help the conversation be specific about which case is being made.

Caveats

What this report does not show¶

A few caveats are worth being explicit about:

This report does not include Lyme-Old Lyme HS class-size data for 2012–13 because that data was not published by Connecticut Mirror. The peer set for the 2012–13 baseline is therefore eight schools rather than nine. LOL’s class size today is self-reported as “12 to 15 per class” on the district’s website, but that is a range and is not directly comparable to the CT Mirror methodology.

This report does not have year-by-year RHAM staffing FTE counts for 2013-14 through 2016-17 or for 2019-20 through 2023-24. The 2018–19 budget book gives a precise snapshot for 2017–18 and 2018–19 with narrative reference to a 2015–16 baseline; the 2025–26 budget presentation gives a current snapshot. The intervening years would have to be reconstructed from individual annual budget books, which were not available within the time frame of this report.

This report uses NCES “classroom teachers” FTE for current staffing comparisons. This excludes school counselors, school psychologists, school nurses, library media specialists, and other certified positions that appear in the RHAM budget book’s “certified positions” line. The ratio comparisons between districts are valid because all districts use the same NCES definition; comparisons between current NCES counts and historical RHAM budget-book counts are not directly valid.

Documentation

Sources¶

RHAM master schedule data (2025–26):

• HS Enrollment Section Details Report, 2/15/26 (607 sections, RHAM PowerSchool): HS_Enrollment_Section_Details_Report-_2-15-26.pdf
• Master Schedule List Report — ART concurrent groups, 2025–26: Master_Schedule_List_Report_-_ART_Concurrent_25-26.pdf
• Master Schedule List Report — CTE concurrent groups: Master_Schedule_List_Report_-_CTE_Concurrent.pdf
• Master Schedule List Report — MUSIC concurrent groups, 2025–26: Master_Schedule_List_Report_-_MUSIC_Concurrent_25-26.pdf
• Master Schedule List Report — PE concurrent groups, 2025–26: Master_Schedule_List_Report_-_PE_Concurrent_25-26.pdf
• RHAM Middle School Team and Unified Arts class schedules, 2025–26: RHAM_Middle_School_Team_and_UA_class__s_2025-2026.pdf

RHAM budget documents:

• FY 2018–19 Region 8 Superintendent’s Budget Proposal, revised 3/7/2018: hebronct.com/…/March-7-2018-revised-RHAM-2018-2019-budget-book.docx-1.pdf
• FY 2025–26 Region 8 Proposed Administrative Budget Presentation, 3/18/2025: hebronct.com/…/budget-presentation-for-hebron-bof_bos-march-2025

Connecticut Mirror “YourSchool” (2012–13 baseline):

• RHAM HS: projects.ctmirror.org/…/61.html
• RHAM MS: projects.ctmirror.org/…/51.html
• HVRHS (RSD 1): projects.ctmirror.org/…/61.html
• Valley Regional HS (RSD 4): projects.ctmirror.org/…/61.html
• Amity Regional HS (RSD 5): (and Amity MS Bethany at /205/51, MS Orange at /205/52)
• Northwestern Regional HS (RSD 7): projects.ctmirror.org/…/61.html
• Joel Barlow HS (RSD 9): projects.ctmirror.org/…/61.html
• Parish Hill HS (RSD 11): projects.ctmirror.org/…/61.html
• Lyme-Old Lyme MS (RSD 18): projects.ctmirror.org/…/51.html (HS class-size field empty in source data)
• E.O. Smith HS (RSD 19): projects.ctmirror.org/…/61.html
• John Winthrop MS (RSD 4): projects.ctmirror.org/…/51.html

National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data, 2024–25 release:

• RHAM HS: nces.ed.gov/…/school_detail.asp
• RHAM MS: nces.ed.gov/…/school_detail.asp
• LOL HS: nces.ed.gov/…/school_detail.asp
• Other peer schools accessible from the NCES public school detail pages by school name

Peer district class-size statements (current):

• HVRHS: hvrhs.org/new-this-is-us (“Our classes average 15”)
• Lyme-Old Lyme: region18.org/about-us (“average 12 to 15 per class”)
• Northwestern Regional: nwr7.com/district (“academic program 20”)

Technical notes

Methodology notes¶

Concurrent group consolidation. The PowerSchool extract reports each course-section combination as a separate row, which double-counts classroom-meetings where one teacher teaches multiple course numbers in the same room at the same time. I identified 35 such concurrent groups in the HS extract (with assistance from the supplied Master Schedule List reports for ART, CTE, MUSIC, and PE) and consolidated them, reducing 607 rostered sections to 564 distinct classroom-meetings. The middle school extract was structured differently and required less consolidation.

View definitions. View A includes every classroom-meeting in the consolidated extract. View B excludes sections explicitly named as Lab, Tutorial, Resource, Workshop, Study, or Support, and excludes one-on-one specialized instructional sections. View C limits to the standard core academic departments (English, Math, Science, Social Studies, World Language). Subject categorizations follow the RHAM department coding in the master schedule.

Teacher-eye vs. student-eye means. Teacher-eye = sum(section_size) / count(sections). Student-eye = sum(section_size²) / sum(section_size). The student-eye measure is the size-weighted mean class size from the perspective of a randomly selected student, and is what most parents intuitively mean when they ask about class size. Both are reported throughout because both are legitimate — they answer different questions.

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Other Formats¶

This report is available in four formats, all located alongside this page: