I came to UPrep in seventh grade because it advertised what I didn’t have in a public middle school: the ability to get help from my teachers. The small number of students and the small average class size allowed me to foster academic relationships that gave me the attention I needed to excel at school. With the post ULab growth of the student body, I don’t think that fact is true anymore.
There are a lot of problems created by an expanded student body: worse parking availability, serpentine lunch lines with 20-minute waits, crowded assemblies that occasionally exceed the maximum occupancy of the Pumadome. But the core of my criticism isn’t squished bleachers or looking for a spot outside the parking lot, it’s that I am less connected with my teachers than I ever have been. The addition of the third-floor faculty office has made it difficult to find teachers before school when I have questions about the homework. A ten-minute walk from one end of the campus to the other has proven an effective deterrent to seeking academic assistance.
Furthermore, the larger class sizes have hindered my ability to have a personal relationship with my teachers. Even though there’s only one more person in an average room, only a 6.7% increase, every student added is someone who takes up space in class. Compounding this, the average class size when I was a freshman was just over 86 students. Now it’s increased by 29% to 107. It’s great to have more people. There’s nothing wrong in theory with a bolstered community. But these additions are slowly making UPrep feel less like the UPrep I joined. The campus feels like a community college, where a sprawl of jumbled buildings house students who walk past each other without knowing each other. Expanding the school might be better for our sports teams and make the school feel more prestigious, but it’s important to remember this is such a thing as a school getting too big. The next time the school decides to build another structure, we should probably ask a few more tough questions than we did with the ULab.