As more students join campus with each growing class, students and faculty share their thoughts on overcrowding and how this impacts the daily goings on of the school.

“There were moments from last year where I had to sit on the floor because of how crowded the cafeteria was,” junior Dylan Evans said. “Thankfully, now I can get to lunch early enough to get my own seat. With the new high school being opened I think it will help spread the students more evenly mostly with the new first-year student coming in every year.” 

Eagle Mountain-Saginaw Independent School District will open its fifth high school in the 2023-2024 school year. They are projected to shift student populations around and redistrict the area. While construction is underway, each school must manage the growing population while maintaining safety for all on campus.

“As of right now, we are limited in staff, and with the numbers growing, we have to deal with it the way we always have, but having a larger number of students increases the number of negative issues or incidents,” security supervisor Jerome Scott said. “With any emergency, all staff responds. We come to the situation, assess, intervene, separate the individuals, find the aggressor and the victims and do the crowd control.” 

Security personnel oversees crowded situations such as violent incidents, pep rallies, passing periods and continually over the course of the day by walking hallways.

Security isn’t the only administrator on campus that face these difficult situations as teachers constantly face large class sizes, and former Eagle Mountain-Saginaw ISD substitute teacher Jeremy Gonzalez said it’s vital to eliminate this issue.

“When I was a substitute last year, I would constantly be in classes with classrooms so full there weren’t always seats for some of the students,” Gonzalez said. “At times I would always see students on the floor of the cafeteria because there were just zero free seats for them. Hopefully, the new school will keep situations like this from happening.” 

To learn more about the new EMSISD high school, click this link.