Overcrowding in LM has become a larger issue in the past few years, due to an influx of new students to the district and larger class sizes. There has been talk for years of amending the “choice zone,” where rising high school students are allowed to choose between LM or Harriton, or simply requiring more high schoolers in the district to attend Harriton, a bigger building that is not overcrowded in the slightest. LMSD finally came up with a firm solution to help dilute the crowding of LM—an update to the partner schooling plan. With the update, any high school students registered in the district after June 15, 2024 would be assigned to Harriton. This was a big change that meant only a handful of new students at all in LM for the 2024-2025 school year, aside from incoming freshmen. The plan was paused in May, with administration claiming it would enforce the plan when necessary, but now has been firmly reinstated.
The change to partner schooling means a lot of different things for the LM community. The major change is that any new high school student will automatically be assigned to Harriton, where, according to the LMSD website, “the facility and staffing levels are better able to accommodate enrollment growth.” Whether it is convenient or not, the choice is not up to the student or their parents. While current LM students might not think much of this, it will likely be a hindrance to transfers. Isabel Colantonio ’26, who transferred to the district her freshman year, says that “if the policy was active when I came to the district, I would be assigned to Harriton even though I live ten minutes away from LM. I’m glad they enacted it after, because it would be such an unnecessary inconvenience for me to commute to Harriton.” This is one story, but more are likely to come with this removal of choice for incoming transfer students.
The hope of the policy is that the allocation of high school students between LM and Harriton will be less uneven. Even though Harriton is a larger school, it has significantly less students: 1230 students are currently enrolled at Harriton while a whopping 1701 students populate LM, according to the LMSD website. Acting Superintendent Megan Shafer stated that “the goal of starting partner-schooling at the high school level was to help equalize the school sizes—which was the intent when the two ‘new’ high schools, which can accommodate the same size student populations, were built.” The plan was reinstated due to the rise of enrollments, in hopes of an “even distribution of the student populations across both schools, [which will help] alleviate overcrowded classes and facilities,” according to Shafer.
One has to wonder, will LMSD keep this policy? Will the LM student body be made up from kids only from the district’s three middle schools? Is the hope that the two populations will balance out over time feasible? Shafer assures that LMSD will “continue to assess the impact of this decision and determine if changes to the practice are necessary moving forward.” The district administration has been working to help new families with high school students transfer to Harriton as seamlessly as possible and making sure that both schools feel a positive, if any, effect. We will see in the next few years, assuming the district keeps the policy, if the population imbalance evens out over time.
