Huge charts line the walls. Even desks are bigger to accommodate students who are taller and heavier than children were half a century ago, when many area schools were built. Classrooms, on the other hand, can't expand. Teachers are stuck with the same amount of space and twice the stuff to squeeze into it. At Walton's Townsend Elementary School, Roberta Austin and Lynn Podskoch were busy Thursday morning preparing their first-grade classroom for 21 students who will occupy the desks scattered strategically around the room.
School starts next week.
Gone are the traditional straight rows of desks that many baby boomers remember fondly. Children now sit in desks arranged in clusters to encourage kids to interact with each other. Learning stations line the walls. A cart filled with the new reading curriculum looms in a corner, stuffed with encyclopedia-sized volumes of anthologies that pupils will have to make their way through before the end of the year. A bright poster hangs on the wall above the butterfly station, where a table, already covered with books, learning aids and models, awaits the arrival of the milkweed munching caterpillars that will undergo their metamorphosis into butterflies right before the students' eyes.