Many students and teachers who would be going to Northwood were instead moved to the new school, Seaforth High School, this school year, which has led to some changes at Northwood. Seaforth currently has only freshman and sophomore classes, and a majority of those students have come from Northwood. Clubs and sports at Northwood are having to change as a result of there being fewer students and different teachers this year. The wrestling team is one such example.
“Right now we have a new coach,” senior wrestler Noah Kelly said. “Normally we have a lot of matches and tournaments; we only have six tournaments this year. Our former coach has gone to Seaforth…The team at Seaforth is pretty big now and our team is very small. We barely have people to fit slots for it [the team].”
Seaforth sophomore William Little was on the Junior Varsity basketball team at Northwood, but is now a student at Seaforth.
“It’s been difficult to play basketball at Seaforth,” Little said. “I knew people at Northwood and loved playing basketball. Only having two classes [at Seaforth] hurts because I don’t have any upperclassmen and can’t play the sport I love to play [the way I want to].”
It isn’t just the students that are struggling as several teachers left Northwood to go to Seaforth, too. With a labor shortage going on right now in the U.S that is having a direct effect on schools and substitute teachers, not only are there fewer substitutes at Northwood this year, but they are also now able to choose whether to go to Seaforth or Northwood. Ms. Debra Espisito is the school treasurer at Northwood and is in charge of coordinating coverage for classes with absent teachers.
“Subs are allowed to list the grade level they are willing to sub for as well, so of those remaining available, not all prefer or will sub at high school level,” Esposito said. “Many subs are retired from teaching or other jobs and unable to work beyond a certain number of days without affecting their taxes significantly at year end so they limit the number of days they sub. It’s a complicated and time-consuming effort and frequently, with not enough subs to fill the need, teachers on-site give up their already limited planning period to cover a colleague’s room.”
The shrunken faculty size has some upsides, though. Now that there are more open classrooms, the world language trailer pods were removed and all of the department’s teachers now have classrooms in the building. French teacher Sharon Kolman moved from the pods to the 600 hallway. When asked whether this was a positive or negative change, Kolman described it as “very positive.”
“There were advantages to being in the pods … but we were always left out of things,” Kolman said. “This is my first year in my ten years here that I’ve been in the building, so I’m able to get to know different teachers better and get to be closer to everything… I think between Covid and the new school opening, [it] has really been hard on world languages in particular. We’ve lost two Spanish teachers and numbers are really low for the French class so I think it’s made a big dent…So I miss people.”
The national labor shortage has also made finding bus drivers hard, and Seaforth students have been taking the same bus as Northwood students. Seaforth shares its two buses with Northwood’s seven. This has led to most buses operating close to full capacity with longer route durations than previous years. Occasionally, students have been moved from the bus they usually take home to new buses in order to fit more students. Junior Giselle Hernandez has been taking the bus in the afternoon and has experienced the situation firsthand.
“Everyday we have to pick them [Seaforth students] up,” Hernandez said. “Then in the afternoon we have to drop them off. And so the bus gets really crowded. And then makes the bus routes take much longer.”
The opening of Seaforth has brought changes to Northwood and its community as well as Pittsboro as a whole. The addition of a fourth traditional high school in Chatham will likely continue to impact the rest of the district in various ways over the course of the next few years.
