This year, the school has the biggest freshman class on record of the school being open and the school has a total of 1,418 students with 55 additional students enrolled.
According to registrar Deana Thom, who registers new and existing students in the school, the increased building of townhomes in the Shawnee area has contributed to the increasing student body.
“We are seeing a trend that we are enrolling more than withdrawing,” Thom said. “I see that trend because we now have townhomes in our district.”
But Thom believes that the townhomes themselves aren’t where the main contribution lies, rather it’s the effects the townhomes have on the general population.
“Before [the townhomes] it was single-family homes and a few duplexes. You [would] see if a family moved, then a family came in,” Thom said. “But we don’t see that anymore, because, with the townhomes, there’s a little more fluctuation of people not leaving but coming in.”
This influx of students at school has led to departments becoming crowded. According to Page Anderson, an English teacher, her class sizes have been increasing every year.
“My class sizes were 23, 24, 25 [students],” Anderson said. “Now most of my classes are 26, 27, 28 students. I had one class this year that had 29 students in it, which is a lot because I only have 28 desks.”
Additionally, the lack of transfers from Mill Valley to De Soto High School contributes to the influx of students. According to Thom, in the past there would be around 70 transfers from the incoming MVHS freshman class to DHS, so students could take specific classes they wanted. Now that both schools have access to the CTEC building, there has been less of an urge to transfer schools.
“There’s just a few [career based class options] depending on what pathway you wanted to go into, but now that we have the CTEC building and the programs at CTEC, students don’t have to choose,” Thom said.
Anderson suggests that the English department gain at least one or two more teachers to compensate for the increase in the student body and class sizes. She explained that this is needed because the grading of essays is now taking longer than ever.
“I have 110 juniors, so when they turn in an essay, what would normally take me two weeks to grade, it’s now taking me three weeks or more to grade, just because there’s so many,” Anderson said.
The student influx has not only affected administration and teachers but also the hallway traffic in the school. Senior Keisey Walker shares where she has seen hallway traffic happen.
“By the stairs coming out of B-hall people are always trying to get into B-hall and going up the [main] stairs, and it’s like traffic,” Walker said.
