Broward County School District in suburban Miami jokingly calls itself "the portable capital of the world" - and for a good reason.
With more than 2,000 modular classrooms in use, the booming, 200,000-student school district uses both portable schools and portable classroom annexes to accommodate students unable to squeeze into standard classrooms.Things are so tight, that some students go through an entire day without setting foot in a standard school building, shuffling instead from one prefabricated trailer-like classroom to another.
To Broward, portable classrooms are the only way to accommodate all the students in a district that's growing by 10,000 a year.
"Baby boomers all of the sudden have decided to have babies late in their lifetimes," said Lee Stepanchak, the district's director of property management and site acquisition. "We in school facilities have to meet the needs."
School enrollment reached a record 52.2 million students nationwide this year, higher than the record set by the baby boom generation in 1971. Enrollment is expected to continue to increase for a decade, then plateau after 2007.
While some say sending kids to school in portable classrooms hurts their education, others say it's rapidly becoming an inescapable part of public schools in the '90s.
At the Virginia Beach School District in Virginia, officials shift portable classrooms from school to school in an attempt to stay on top of the district's shifting population. These classrooms, said John Kalocay, prevent the district from building unnecessary additions and keep students from cramming into classrooms. Kalocay is the district's assistant superintendent of administrative support services.
Though the growth at Virginia Beach leveled off during the past few years, the district recently adapted an initiative to keep primary grades in classes of no more than 22. Portable classrooms, argues Kalocay, have allowed flexibility, letting the district move the classrooms around depending on which schools need them.
Virginia Beach owns 366 portable classrooms, but only uses 347. The remaining classrooms are kept in reserve in the event a population bubble makes them necessary.
Though he has heard complaints about using the modulars, Kalocay said most parents "accept it as a fact of life."
"They know we try to provide the best for the students," he said.
The population explosion is a bonanza for companies that produce the buildings. U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley has said nationally some 6,000 additional schools must be built in the next 10 years to accommodate the growth.
"We're filling a need that's very important," said Paula Johnston, a spokeswoman for GE Capital Modular Space, a Pennsylvania-based corporation that has more than 100 sales offices throughout the United States, Mexico, Europe and Canada. "It's a good market for us."
GE has built classrooms ever since it began constructing modules in 1966 - its first building, in fact, was a classroom.
And it's continued to spruce up its classrooms as the demand became greater, offering landscaping, blackboards and air conditioning in an effort to compete with permanent additions.
Some schools aren't relying on private business to solve their space problems. The Hillsborough County School District in Tampa, Florida, has a crew that builds portable classrooms. While it costs about $32,000 to obtain a manufactured portable classroom, it only costs about $20,000 to build one, says Randolph Poindexter, assistant superintendent for administration in the district.
The district added 40 portables this year, bringing the portable classroom count up to 1,850 spread through the 170 schools in the district.
"We're building them as fast as we can build them, but this is a temporary solution," Poindexter said.