What does a fifth grader’s daily schedule have to do with overcrowded Iowa City high schools? Read on. Nathan Hill’s Nov. 21 feature on overcrowding got us to thinking. High schools designed for about 1600 students. Filled to the walls. Large classes. Crowded hallways. What to do? Local taxpayers may have minimal enthusiasm for new multi-million-dollar high schools – especially with new libraries and jails on the drawing boards.

Temporary buildings? They’re cheaper. But not that much – and kind of like tents. Besides, years later they’re still ”temporarily” there, eyesores taking up school grounds.

“Schools within schools”? Great idea. U.S. Secretary of Education Riley promoted it in Iowa City. Divide each entering freshman class into two groups of 200. They stick together for four years. Each student with an adult mentor. Individual education plans. Teachers who know them. Classmates, too. Less violence. Improved attendance – and achievement.

But it still leaves 1600 students in each building.

About 30 years ago, in the Cedar Rapids school district’s Hiawatha Elementary School, an experiment was tried with fifth and sixth graders. Each student had a notebook scheduler. They were given choices about when to attend required presentations. They were personally responsible for getting required work done and getting to where they were supposed to be on time.

“It will never work,” the teachers were warned. “They’re too young.”

They weren’t too young.  It did work. And the early experience of taking responsibility for their own lives and work served them well during their later years in high school, college and the workplace.

Consider students at the University of Iowa. A full class load involves only 12 to 15 hours a week in a classroom. Imagine the impact on crowded classrooms if a semester’s 15 credit hours required 30 classroom hours a week. The University would need twice as many classrooms, or have twice as many students in each.

The presumption in college is that students are doing most of their learning on their own. The informal rule is about two hours outside of class for every hour in – a 45-hour week total.

Of course, there are always those who would prefer to spend that time drinking beer. But they soon discover, if not in college then shortly thereafter, just how much that beer has cost them.

If fifth graders can learn to plan their time, if college students must do most of their learning on their own, we can certainly ask some of our high school students to do the same.

ABC News recently reported recommendations that 11th and 12th grades be abolished. That high school end with 10th grade. That would certainly solve overcrowding!

Our proposal is a little less radical.

But we’re not just talking about academically gifted high school students headed for graduate-level university degrees.

Any student can qualify – once she demonstrates the sense of responsibility to use time wisely. It may be job shadowing. An academic research paper. An internship, or apprenticeship. An arts project.

It is a privilege, an honors program for those with all levels of academic ability. Anyone who abuses the privilege is quickly back in school fulltime.

Wouldn't at least twenty percent of the students at City and West qualify?

If, during any given hour of any school day, half of them (150-200 students) were pursuing their education outside the building the overcrowding problem would vanish like a Kinnick Stadium crowd after the fourth quarter.

Is this the only solution? Of course not. Is it the best solution? Maybe not.

But it is illustrative of what some creative thought can do.

There are others.

Block scheduling and team teaching. Greater variety in class size. We don’t need 30 students in every classroom all the time. Hundreds can attend a performance, lecture, film showing, do computer drills, or individual study. Other learning may require one-on-one.

You don’t need a doctorate in education to come up with the current choice between complaining a lot about crowding, on the one hand, or building more high schools on the other. Why do school boards pay for the expertise of superintendents and administrators? Because of the ability of professionals to think outside the boxes in which we are currently housing our high school students.

Creative, innovative solutions. We’d like to see more of them.

Mary Vasey is a retired teacher from Cedar Rapids’ Metro High. Her husband, Nicholas Johnson, is a member of the Iowa City district school board.