Over a month into the school year, Garfield High School is still facing class size issues.

Under the teacher’s union contract, teachers are not legally required to teach more that 32 students per class, and more than 150 per day. If those conditions are not met, teachers have the right to file a grievance with the Seattle Public School District after October 1. This week, Garfield teachers as a staff have decided to file a formal grievance with the district, according to Rebecca Shope and Jessica Jacklet, two of Garfield’s union representatives.

Garfield administrators raised controversy when they met with teachers individually over the last couple weeks to discuss the class size issue.

Several teachers said that they felt the administration had tried to divide the staff in order to avoid the filing of grievances.

“It was like we were in trouble, waiting in the office,” said a science teacher who asked to remain anonymous. The systemic problem of overfilled classes was approached on an individual level, which is why many teachers said they found the proceedings inappropriate. “[The discussion] was, are you, individually, going to agree to [not file a grievance],” said the teacher. “It was out of line.”

Dersé said the interviews were a necessary step to evaluate the feelings of teachers with overfilled classes. “I felt it was a good faith effort (to solve the problem),” said Dersé. “We were doing what we needed to do.”

Dersé said that she saw the one-on-one interviews as the best option. “We explored the options given our situation,” she said.

She also realized that she could not simply pull kids out of classes without consulting teachers.

“That would have been perceived as heavy handed as well,” she said.

Dersé said that no teacher brought any of those concerns to her. She said that the interviews had been a useful tool to ascertain whether the teachers with overfilled classes would, in fact, grieve.

Language Arts teacher Mark Lovre said his meeting with the administrative team was not intimidating.

“Their simple question was, ‘Are you going to grieve?’” said Lovre, who opted not to file a grievance. “I felt like had I said, ‘Yes, I’m going to grieve,’ they would have said, ‘OK, that’s good information.’”

In fact, the administration later approached him about balancing his College Prep writing class even after he said he would not grieve.

“They were working on the problem outside the notion of grieve/not grieve,” Lovre said.

Meeting with the teachers as a whole would have been ineffective, Dersé said, because “every situation is different.”

Dersé said she explored many different options to mitigate the class size crisis. She secured money from the district to hire part time teachers in Biology and Spanish, and an Instructional Assistant to help some of Jennifer Judge’s overfilled Latin classes.

Jacklet said the problem is not with Dersé but with the Seattle School District as a whole.

“It’s such an epidemic of a problem,” she said. “[The grievance] is not a reflection on her, it’s a reflection on the district. I think Susan and Lenora [Lee] have done an excellent job of dealing with it.”

Still, many teachers said the meetings were unfair because they did not include a union official.

“People felt intimidated and pressured into not filing grievances,” said the teacher.

Some teachers said that they felt uncomfortable with the pressure of meeting with their boss individually about such a sensitive and systemic problem.