Enrollment may be shrinking in Broward Schools, but some children are learning in crowded classrooms, teachers and parents say, prompting the School Board to direct Superintendent Howard Hepburn to review the situation.
Under a motion passed at a recent meeting, Hepburn has been asked to also provide the board with “a written report identifying classrooms and/or core-curriculum class sections that currently exceed, or are projected to exceed, applicable class-size requirements established by Florida law, as well as schools and grade levels materially exceeding District staffing and student-to-teacher allocation guidelines.”
The request came from District 6 board member Adam Cervera, whose district includes some of the district’s largest schools, including Cypress Bay High in Weston and Western High in Davie.
“This is a big problem in my district,” Cervera told the board. “I’m sure it’s going on in a lot of other districts throughout the county, but in District 6, I am constantly getting emails and phone calls, people stopping me in the supermarket, saying, ‘Hey, what is going on? Why are there so many kids in this classroom or in that classroom?”
Cervera’s motion further directs Hepburn to develop a corrective action plan for any problems identified.
Hepburn said he’s already doing that. He said the district has been hiring teachers and they are being placed in schools where they are needed.
“It’s really no different than what we’re doing right now as far as balancing and distributing … positions to schools that have class-size issues and regional teams working with those schools to exercise the best strategy possible for the least amount of disruption for the students,” Hepburn told the board. “We are at the tail end of it.”
It was still a problem on Sept. 15 when the School Board voted on it, Cervera and parents said.
Plantation parent Brooke Bordy told School Board members her children’s kindergarten and first grade classes each have 25 students in them since the first day of school. State law says classes should be capped at 18 students for grades kindergarten through 3, 22 students for grades 4 through 8; and 25 for high school students. The state measures compliance in October and districts in violation can then face fines.
“We are way over, and it’s too much for our teachers,” Bordy said. “It’s detrimental to our children’s education.”
She said her daughter is one of the youngest children in her kindergarten class.
“I don’t know that she can speak up for herself in a class of 25. I feel that really strongly and this is a reason that some parents are leaving Broward schools,” Bordy told the board. “So if you’re not persuaded from the academic perspective that smaller classes lead to stronger learning for students, please consider that you’re losing enrollment over this. I personally know three families that left BCPS because class sizes are too big.”
Superintendent Howard Hepburn walks through Sunrise Middle School in Fort Lauderdale on the first day of school on Monday, Aug. 10, 2026. (Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun Sentinel)
Cervera and some parents and teachers also have questioned whether the district’s decision last spring to cut 1,000 employee positions due to declining enrollment resulted in many teachers being cut. Hepburn said that’s not the case.
“Broward County Public Schools, in our right-sizing of staff and our right-sizing of facilities and all of that, we did not target the classroom. We did not target teachers,” Hepburn said. “We went for central office and central operations.”
Hepburn said that, just as in past years, teacher allocations are funded based on projected enrollments. If some schools have more students than expected, they gain teachers in the first weeks of school, while schools with declining enrollment lose them.
“We have planned our budget based on the number of kids that are registered in their system,” Hepburn told the South Florida Sun Sentinel during an interview Friday. “At Broward County Public Schools, we have open doors for many of our schools for students to go there for choice reasons, for magnet and innovative programs, and especially for reassignments.
“So students can transition throughout the summer to any school. They have very few schools that are at capacity where we say you can’t enroll here because it’s already at capacity.”
Hepburn said the first step is to see if the school can level class size by assigning extra students in a crowded class to teachers who may have smaller classes at the same school. If not, the district starts moving teachers from one school to the next and also uses newly hired teachers to reduce class sizes.
“In the past couple of weeks, we’ve been shifting around teachers from schools that have experienced a decline in enrollment to schools that have experienced an increase in enrollment. And so that takes time,” Hepburn told the Sun Sentinel.
Board Chairwoman Sarah Leonardi told the Sun Sentinel she witnessed this when she was a high school teacher.
“I remember teachers being transferred several weeks into the school year because of enrollment changes,” she said. “So I’m certainly not discounting the concerns raised by parents who see very large class sizes right now. But the district has proven over and over again that we do even things out. It’s just a lot of changes in the enrollment that we’re dealing with.”