Teamwork bites the dust

By Emily Richmond

Wednesday, March 22, 2006 | 7:08 a.m.

Moving through their first grade classroom at Richard Rundle Elementary School on Tuesday, the husband and wife teaching team of Lopaka and Damian Kins had the choreographed precision of Fred and Ginger.

They alternate taking the lead, with Damian Kins circling the room to answer questions and offer encouragement while her husband directs the class in singing the week's vocabulary words.

The partnership - six years of marriage and three years of sharing a classroom - has been a success. But the Kins, along with Rundle Principal Clarence Ehler, said they're glad it's coming to an end.

The team teaching part of it, that is.

"We're the exception, not the rule, when it comes to team teachers," said Damian Kins, who will become the Las Vegas school's librarian in August while her husband continues to teach first grade on his own.

"School is our life, and that's what makes it easy for us. But there are a lot of teams where teachers were friends, and the friendship has broken up because of problems."

For the 2004-05 academic year, all of Rundle's first and second grade classrooms - 19 total - were team taught. Now, thanks to the arrival of more portable classrooms, the Kins are the sole remaining team. They are also believed to be the only married couple sharing classroom duties in the Clark County School District.

"It's wonderful to be able to have one teacher lead the class while the other works in a small group with students struggling with a particular concept," Ehler said. "Unfortunately what happens more often is the teachers divide up the curriculum - 'You teach social studies, I'll teach math' - when my expectation is that both will be actively involved."

The number of Clark County teachers assigned to "team teaching" - in which two teachers share a single classroom with as many as 38 students between them - has dropped drastically in the last year. For 2005-06 the district has 280 team teachers, down from 581 in the prior academic year.

The drop is due in large part to the 2005 Legislature's revisions to Nevada's class-size reduction program. All public elementary schools are required to have no more than 16 students for every teacher in the first and second grades and 19 students per teacher in third grade.

The state's rural districts are given more leeway in setting class sizes than Clark and Washoe counties.

By the start of the 2011-12 academic year, districts should no longer be using team teaching as a means of satisfying the state's teacher-student ratios, lawmakers said.

"Our intent was always to have one teacher in one classroom with a small number of kids," said Assemblywoman Chris Giunchigliani, D-Las Vegas, a former special education teacher in Clark County who backed the amendment. "That isn't what happened, and team teaching has been used to the detriment of our students."

Team teaching can be effective in certain circumstances, which is why lawmakers aren't calling for a total ban on the practice, Giunchigliani said.

Even though the state's class-size requirements are being met, Kins and her husband feel responsible for all 32 students assigned to their classroom.

"That's more parents to meet and get to know and communicate with, and more students on different ability levels with special needs to be met," Kins said. "I just don't think that's possible for a teacher to do, even when there are two of us."

Nevada Superintendent of Public Instruction Keith Rheault said Clark County's drop in team teaching is "remarkable" and represents the steepest single-year decline he has ever seen. Now the district needs to ensure it has enough classroom seats to keep the numbers down, Rheault said.

To do that the district will need to continue building elementary schools, buying portable classrooms and modernizing older campuses to accommodate more students. Another solution is to have more schools adopt year-round schedules .

The $3.5 billion capital improvement plan, approved by voters in 1998, wasn't designed to address the problem of team teaching, said Paul Gerner, associate superintendent of facilities for the Clark County School District.

With the next bond measure in the early planning stages, the elimination of team teaching will likely be a central issue, Gerner said.

Rheault said his daughter is a team teacher in Reno and "loves it," working with a teacher she has known since their college days together at UNR.

"They work hand-in-hand together," Rheault said. "If you didn't do that, it would be a very long year."

Emily Richmond can be reached at 259-8829 or at [email protected].

In the last year the Clark County School District has made big strides toward eliminating "team teaching," where two teachers share a single classroom with as many as 38 students. The practice began as a way of meeting the state's requirements for teacher-student ratios in grades 1-3.

2005-06 School Year

Teachers assigned to teams

(2004-05 school year figures in parentheses)