The Superintendent of Hanover School Division says progress has been made in trying to reduce class sizes. The province has mandated that over the next five years, all Kindergarten to Grade three classrooms must have twenty students or less.

Ken Klassen says even with considerable growth, they've been able to bring class sizes down over the last number of years. "But we definitely still have larger classes than the provincial average," he says. "We have about seventy-five per cent of our classes K to 3 that are larger than twenty."

The division has implemented what it calls 20K3. Klassen says this means trying to cap all of their Kindergarten to Grade 3 classes at twenty students. In 2012 they were able to add five Kindergarten classes. Klassen says in 2013 they hope to have all Kindergarten classes at twenty students or less. Following that they will target Grade 1 and then Grades 2 and 3.

Klassen says they will need to add between five and eight classrooms every year for the next five years in order to achieve the goal set out by the province. He notes if today they were able to bring all their Kindergarten to Grade 3 classes to 20 students or less, it would mean adding more than 40 classes. "We're going to have to roll it out year by year and request extra classroom space each year as well," says Klassen.

The decision to reduce class sizes was announced prior to the last provincial election and Klassen says the NDP government is making good with its promise. "Clearly the thought is that smaller classes will be good for more individual attention for students," he says. "And when there are special needs perhaps that will give the teacher a little more room to deal with those as well."

Klassen says there are still a handful of Kindergarten to Grade 3 classes in Hanover that have 27 or 28 students. He refers to that as "uncomfortably large." But he says the average size is slightly more than 22. Hanover School Division has a chart indicating the exact class sizes in each school as of September 30th. The chart on the division website will be updated each year.