Students eating lunch at Malcolm X Elementary School. Photo: Mark Coplan/BUSD
Students at Malcolm X. Photo: Mark Coplan/BUSD

In the past few years, Malcolm X Elementary School has gone from a student population of about 400 students to nearly 600. It’s not alone. Many of Berkeley Unified’s schools are grappling with increasing numbers of kids and not necessarily seeing a corresponding growth in resources to handle them.

In an Opinionator piece published on Berkeleyside, Joshua Room, a BUSD graduate himself and former president of Malcolm X PTA, argues that our schools are bursting at the seams and there do not seem to be good short- or long-term alternatives for accommodating the increase. Why, he asks, does BUSD seem “to be repeatedly caught off-guard by this continuing, explosive growth?”

Read the full op-ed piece and join the conversation in the Comments there.

Berkeleyside welcomes submissions of op-ed articles. We ask that we are given first refusal to publish. Topics should be Berkeley-related, local authors are preferred, and we don’t publish anonymous pieces. Please email submissions to us. Berkeleyside will publish op-ed pieces at its discretion.

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