Enrollment is up significantly in both the second and sixth grades for the 2010-11 school year, and the Pequot Lakes School Board met Monday, Aug. 30, to discuss options.

Second grade currently has 125 students enrolled, and originally there were going to be five sections of second grade with 26 students in each section.

Eagle View Principal Don Lenzen said that is too many students per class.

"When it goes over 25, then I say that we have a problem, and the quality of education suffers," Lenzen said.

The board voted to create a sixth section of second grade so each class will have approximately 21 or 22 students. A second grade teacher who had floated down to kindergarten will remain in second grade, and a new kindergarten teacher will be hired.

This addition means Eagle View will be re-appropriating yet another academic classroom. The school was designed to have 28 section classrooms and is now at 32 classrooms.

This time, Eagle View will lose its Mac Lab. In the past the school lost other classrooms such as a music room, a science activity lab and a media center classroom.

The incoming kindergarten class is at six sections already, and Lenzen told the school board this trend may create even more space problems in the future.

"We are built to be a five-section school and we are becoming a six-section school," Lenzen said.

Pequot Lakes Middle School will add another section for sixth grade. There are 127 students enrolled in the four sixth-grade sections, which is 32 students per class.

The school board voted to add a fifth section of sixth grade and now there will only be 25 or 26 students in each class.

Also discussed at the special meeting of the school board was the high number of students signed up for Algebra II. Principal Rankin along with the high school math staff rearranged things so now there are three sections of the class so they won't be overcrowded.

In other action, the school board:

*Approved the hiring of Ann Schomer as a elementary teacher, and paraprofessionals Lori Bernu, Lori Blaukat, Carrie Chiodi, Mary Lawrence, and Jessica Thrun.