From the outside, the meeting appears casual. Nine people sit around a couple of desks that have hastily been pushed together in the middle of a classroom. Music hums quietly in the background and students come and go through the door. Larry Matsuda, a consultant working on the construction of Garfield’s new building, pulls out a paper that holds the answer to why these nine people have gathered: new Garfield has room for 74 classrooms, but it needs 76. Two more rooms must be found.

Someone suggests turning a common area to a classroom, but the idea is rejected. Maybe the ASB room could be converted? No, ASB needs its own space. Finally, we have a winner: take an oversized table storage closet, knock out a wall, and there will be plenty of room for a math class.

“Okay, but where will the tables go if this storage closet becomes a classroom?”

And the search continues.

By all accounts, new Garfield is going to beautiful. The north wing of the third floor will be solely devoted to art: there’s a ceramics room, 2D and 3D art rooms, and multiple darkrooms. The Seattle School District is bringing us Project Lead the Way, an engineering program in which students will design and construct models of anything from mini skyscrapers to bridges. We will even have a greenhouse. But while the design team and district were fixated on supporting world-class electives at Garfield, the administration is now scrambling to find classrooms for core subjects.

The building is a historic site, and so the exterior could not be touched by the builders. And while the 3rd floor annex has been extended, there will be no room for portables at the new site.

“The phrase ‘short on classrooms’ isn’t accurate, because there’s ample space for 1600 kids,” says Steve Moore, the Project Manager. Everyone fit in the building before and class sizes will remain the same, but teachers requiring regular-sized classrooms will have to share.

The reason is simple: money. The district was focused on maximizing efficiency, and felt that leaving classrooms open for one period every day (i.e. teacher prep periods), was a waste of space.

Mr. Howard said many staff members were astounded that the design team could’ve let something like this happen. “It’s kind of like a bucket of ice water being dumped on your head,” said art teacher Bonnie Hungate-Hawk. For many teachers, their classroom is a home away from home, where they can organize their materials and decorate the walls to suit their style. Not to mention that maneuvering between groups of students while pushing a cart full of books is no fun.

The rooming dilemma can be traced back to conflicts between Garfield and the school district concerning the original plans. In 2002, when Susan Derse was principal, Garfield planned to have four academies within the big school, meaning that smaller groups of students would attend all their classes together. The aim of this idea was for students to develop closer relationships with teachers and a group of peers. At the time, the movement for small schools was a hot new trend heavily backed by money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But the plan just wouldn’t work for Garfield: getting a large group of Garfield kids in the same level of math, taking the same language, and participating in the same electives (such as band) would border on impossible.

When Mr. Howard replaced Ms. Derse, he took matters into his own hands. He told the district that he wanted the proposed courtyard on the second floor to be replaced by six more classrooms. The district replied that this would cost $200,000, and Mr. Howard confidently responded that he could raise that kind of money from the Garfield community. But district officials said that this would be unnecessary; the courtyard would be a pleasant hangout area and bring plenty of sunlight into the new building. And, as Moore pointed out, research shows that natural light improves test scores.

Mr. Howard’s proposal was denied, but it brought attention to the need for teacher space. Two rooms were built on both the second and third floors that will serve as offices for teachers to work in during their prep periods. Each office room holds 10 cubicles and has an adjoining conference room (along with the main teachers’ lounge on the first floor).

Garfield science teacher Meade Johnson has been switching rooms for six years — he calls himself “homeless” — but he’s a proponent of sharing teaching space. “The thing I’ve benefited from is, because you’re in other teachers’ rooms, you’re in contact with a lot more teachers: collaborating, learning from different teaching styles, sharing ideas and curriculum,” he said. And moving around might also force particularly messy teachers to clean up their overflowing piles of paper and boxes from the move. “You need to be organized, which I think is advantageous,” Johnson said. Mr. Howard has even speculated about pairs of teachers team-teaching, a plan he has yet to unveil to the staff.

Mr. Howard wants teachers to share classrooms and conference space with colleagues in their department, and to have their cubicle space close by. The fact that the school was planned for small learning environments is not conducive to these ideas. Science classrooms are scattered around the school in groups with History, Language Arts, and Math rooms.

Eliminating the courtyard is out of the question, because retrofitting the space now would cost $2.3 million. But converting some Commons areas into classrooms appears to have solved the crisis. This new space will boost Garfield’s classroom count from 74 to 80. New problems have arisen recently, however, because building codes require them to be open, with only three walls, so there will be no way to lock the doors. This will make those rooms easy targets for theft. And what will happen during lockdowns?

A new space has been found to store the tables. If everything goes according to plan, the number of teachers who have to move classrooms twice a day might be limited to a few as six.

But nothing will be set in stone until the master schedule is finalized next Friday. And according to Ms. Lee, the Assistant Principal, more unforeseen obstacles have arisen. While the administration originally wanted teachers to share rooms with others in their department, Ms. Lee says this might no longer be feasible. Classroom sharing has significantly added to the already complex formula for the master schedule.

And the pursuit goes on.