With 443 students, the new freshmen class is the largest Randall has ever seen.

The start of the school year left teachers scramming to add desks to classrooms. Now, many class sizes have a 30+:1 student/ teacher ratio. The increase in student population, and even bigger classes expected to come from Westover Junior High in the upcoming years, students, faculty and administrators are beginning to wonder how they will accommodate the ever growing student population.

“It’s overwhelming,” sophomore Kaylee Cochran said. “Everywhere you look there are more freshmen.”

This year, the student population at Randall has risen to 1581, close to one hundred more students than last school year. According to Cochran, the increase in hallway traffic and bigger class sizes is causing a problem.

“The math hallway gets really backed up,” Cochran said. “Since the freshmen are new, they don’t know all the best ways to get to class.”

Other than the hallways during passing periods, the amount of traffic in the mornings and afternoons has also caused things to slow down.

“I wait until 4:15 to leave every day,” Cochran said. “If the upperclassman waited at the end of every day to leave, there wouldn’t be so much congestion.”

In addition to the increased number of traffic jams, problems with student scheduling has also developed.

“It’s difficult because you can’t move students around,” guidance counselor Brandi Sanderson said. “If a student comes in to change their schedule, it’s very hard to make the change.”

The traditional course plan for freshman includes classes like English I, Biology, World History and Algebra I. According to Sanderson, scheduling these courses in the past was not a problem, but now the counseling center faces new challenges.

“We try to make classes as small as we can,” Sanderson said. “We’ve had to add some classes to the teachers’ schedules.”

With the addition of several new teachers, this stress has been eased some, but the large class size will continue to be a problem as the years progress.

“I foresee either having to add on to the school, or building a new school,” Sanderson said. “Or maybe change the district boundaries so more kids go to Canyon High School.”

As Canyon High School’s student body is smaller than Randall’s at 1124 students, this shift could be a possibility. Another idea would be to have teachers sharing rooms, so that one may use the room while the other has a conference period, but Sanderson says she hasn’t “heard any definite decisions.”