Airport High School should have bigger classrooms

By Madilyn B.

Students who attend Airport Highschool have constantly complained about the classrooms and how small the classrooms are. Multiple students have addressed the stress from the classroom being so small, An average high school classroom is about 800 to 1,100 square feet often with dimensions like 30 by 30 feet and is meant to hold about 20 to 30 children at once, which feels small and is completely unethical!. I believe that classrooms should be bigger. 

One reason to defend this claim has to do with students’ mental health.  Students have increasingly complicated academic and mental health needs, when you put 20 or 30 or even 40 of them in one class it's impossible to meet every individual student's needs and you are incapable of being in control of the classroom, every student deserves to be academically helped and their academic or mental needs should be met no matter the circumstances.  

Class sizes have such an impact on how a student learns and interprets things, classroom sizes impact what teachers can and can't do, like help and support every student's needs. 

Additionally, larger classroom sizes would positively impact teachers’ mental health as well.  Many teachers tend to feel overworked or overwhelmed due to the over crowded classrooms or classrooms that are too small holding a lot of children, even causing teacher shortages, the majority of teachers feel overworked, 77% of teachers say their job is frequently stressful and 68% say it's overwhelming, 53% reported being burnt out in a 2025 survey.  Teacher shortages often result in larger class sizes and increased workloads for existing educators which in turn leads to overworked teachers and higher rates of absenteeism. So therefore, if classrooms were larger they could accommodate the larger class sizes that the teacher shortage is causing and also wouldn't continue to make teachers quit because they'd have bigger, better classrooms that are easier to manage.

Health reasons also support why I think classrooms should be bigger. With the classrooms being so small it causes Poor ventilation and air flow leading to headaches, drowsiness, poor academic performance, and increased absenteeism or even anxiety sickness. “The state of ventilation in schools in the United States right now is woefully inadequate,” Richard Corsi, dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Portland State University, told a forum, according to this CDC article. One perfect example of this is when Coronavirus or COVID-19 quickly spread around classrooms causing a 4 year shutdown in multiple different states. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted students' learning and development, resulting in significant learning loss and an increase in mental health challenges. In addition to physical distancing as much as possible, plastic barriers for student desks are one of the top devices currently being deployed.

Some may argue that bigger classrooms can make it harder for teachers to give students the individualized attention they need. To that I would reply that bigger classrooms means more room, not more students.  Having more room would enable  more individual attention because teachers could deal with student issues more privately and discreetly. As it is now, when the teacher talks to one individual kid, the entire class hears it, which might embarrass the student. Also, if kids have issues with each other, a bigger classroom would enable teachers to separate the bad seeds from each other. 

I´ve interviewed Ashley Z. A Freshman at Airport high school who says she absolutely loves Ms. Rosales Spanish 1 class, but her class is extremely packed from front row to back and she constantly feels trapped due to her desk being stuck in a corner, Ashley states ¨I have to physically shimmy out of the back corner and go around all the desks just to get a tissue, it's stressful.¨

Solange C. Another freshman at Airport high school claims that the teacher shortage is painfull, not only to the teachers but to the students who have to struggle and suffer without a teacher being put with a subsitute who does nothing but sit there.

Solange also mentions her English 2 class and how the classroom is small with too many desks, there's barely any room to sit with the desks trampling over each other. Solange also mentions cheating and how sitting students too close encourages cheating among classrooms. 

Elijá J., a student who also attends Airport Highschool as a freshman states in his opinion, classrooms should be larger and teachers workload should be lessened and there should be more teachers helping each other, he states sitting too close to some one in class causes distractions and could easily cause disagreements, if the desks were more spread out and the classrooms were bigger there would be a easily enforced zero tolerance policy of cheating, he states that teachers need to try harder to keep their students engaged. 

In conclusion, Airport along with many other schools need to consider their students and how stressful being shoved in a class with too many students can be, as well as dangerous, if you're interested in this topic and want to learn more about classroom sizes and the issues it causes visit these websites!.