New Teachers Battle 1st-Day Jitters

Roaming the same cheery classroom Thursday, reading books with the same 32 clear-eyed, second-graders and sitting directly across from each other at the same desk, it’s a good thing teachers Kristin Del Pizzo and Debbie Holm like each other.

Because on this, their first day of school as staff teachers at Walnut School in Newbury Park, they are stuck with each other.

A lack of classroom space at elementary schools such as Walnut has spurred a surge in the temporary sharing of classrooms while districts rush to whittle classes for the youngest students.

But shared classrooms at Walnut, the addition of ninth-graders at Simi Valley high schools and the usual end-of-summer student gripes couldn’t dampen first-day-of-school-fervor at eastern Ventura County schools. In Simi Valley, Moorpark, Oak Park and the Conejo Valley alike, the biggest buzz is about smaller classes for impressionable youngsters.

At Walnut, rather than complain about sharing a room, Del Pizzo and Holm said they view their comparatively rare situation as an opportunity.

Youngsters will get a student-to-teacher ratio lower than the 20-to-1 ratio required to take part in the state’s $971-million class-size reduction program. Parents hope to see better scores in reading and mathematics. And as new teachers in their own classroom for the first time, Del Pizzo and Holm will have someone to steady them when the new-teacher jitters hit.

“We were both a little nervous this morning,” said Del Pizzo, who like Holm recently graduated from Pepperdine University’s master’s program and received a teacher’s certificate. “The veteran teachers told us that everyone is nervous on their first day, but it helped to have someone to lean on a little bit.”

In the classroom, the paired teachers put weeks of planning to work, trading duties at story time and during an activity focusing on the weather, segueing easily from work at the front of the class to table-level monitoring.

“They’ve been teaching now for 2 1/2 hours,” Principal Bradley Baker said. “And I’d say their careers are doing great.”

Working with another teacher helps with small and large classroom issues, Holm said. When Del Pizzo was teaching, for instance, Holm took a breather and worked on remembering everyone’s names.

There is another advantage, Holm said. “I’m sure I’ll pick up some skills she has, and she’ll pick up some skills from me. We’ll get ideas from each other.”

Their students, heads bowed as they printed the letters of the alphabet, seemed blithely unaware that they were in a shared classroom with a pair of new teachers.

Most couldn’t tell the difference in class size, and for good reason. Last year’s primary classes typically contained 32 students, Baker said. “This is normal to them,” he said. “This [class size] is exactly what it was last year. We’re lucky it’s not 40 students” and two teachers.

For Kacey Cao, 7, the class size meant that her best friend was in her class. And the new teachers? “They are pretty and nice and they let us draw and write and sometimes talk and they tell us to respect each other,” Kacey said.

For the first day of classes, and smaller classes at that, Walnut’s Thursday scene was remarkably calm: no skinned knees on the playground, only a few kindergartners crying for mommy and no visible crowding--even in the room shared by Del Pizzo and Holm.

At Simi Valley’s Royal High School, where classes also began Thursday, it was a somewhat different story.

A school district reconfiguration, that bumped ninth-graders into high school for the first time ever, prompted somewhat cramped conditions at Royal and spurred a few complaints from students.

“There are too many people here,” said junior Candace Rambow, 16, dressed in a gold satin shirt, white short shorts and high-heeled sandals for Day One. “It’s too crowded. Last year was better.”

There are lines and sardine-like conditions in classrooms, bathrooms and at lunch, empathized classmate Denise Onsurez, also 16.

Given the fact that the new freshmen swelled the school’s enrollment by 620 students to about 2,400, Principal Doug Huckaby had a different take on the first day of school.

“I’m surprised at how smoothly things are going,” Huckaby said as he monitored the strikingly smooth flow of students between classes from the grassy quad.

Things will be even better in two weeks, he said, when six portable classrooms are delivered to campus and set up. For now, some students are attending classes in the library and the multipurpose room.

In the long term, the school district expects the overcrowding to ease as more students begin attending Santa Susana High School, a magnet school for performing arts and technology that opened Thursday.

New ninth-grader John Miller, 13, didn’t notice the crowded conditions so much. But being in high school is definitely different, he said. “It’s a lot bigger than junior high school and everyone’s a lot older than you are.”