Houston ISD is packing more elementary school students into classes this year, while several local suburban districts have had better success limiting class sizes after struggling in recent years.

Chronicle reporter Leah Binkovitz reported on the suburban trend, noting that the Fort Bend, Katy, Conroe and Lamar Consolidated school districts are seeking fewer exemptions to exceed the state’s class-size limits. The state caps class sizes at 22 students per teacher in kindergarten through fourth grade, but districts routinely get waivers from the Texas Education Agency.

HISD, the state’s largest district, is seeking 1,499 waivers this year — meaning 39 percent of its classrooms in the applicable grade levels exceed 22 students, according to HISD data. The numbers are up from last year, when HISD requested 1,170 waivers, representing 34 percent of its classrooms.

HISD’s enrollment has increased significantly since it took over the North Forest school district in 2013, but the waiver requests are increasing at a higher rate.

The interactive chart below shows how HISD’s waivers have more than doubled over the last decade. In some cases, the classes may have only 23 or 24 students; the state doesn’t require districts to report the number of students above the cap of 22.



Like most districts, HISD saw a large spike in waivers in 2011 after the state Legislature cut $5.4 billion from public education funding. Lawmakers restored some of the funding last year, which some district officials said enabled them to hire more teachers to reduce class sizes.

“Definitely one of the priorities that everybody labeled was to get more teachers,” Steven Bassett, the chief financial officer for Fort Bend ISD, told the Chronicle. “There’s two things that allowed us to have the money for that investment: property values going up and the state funding.”

In HISD, many of the schools requesting the most waivers this year are in southwest Houston, an area growing so fast that the district is planning to build a new elementary school slated to open in 2016.

View the interactive map of schools requesting 20 or more waivers this year. A list of the waivers for all schools is below. Schools rated “improvement required” by the state based on test scores are not granted waivers.

HISD Class Size Waivers 2014