Crowded classrooms: Omaha Public Schools has worst student-teacher ratio in metro area and in state

Teacher Mila Herszbaum-Harding challenges, believes in and loves on her students at Castelar Elementary School, almost all of whom come from Spanish-speaking immigrant families. 

At the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year, some students could barely write a word of English.

By May, the last week of the school year, many of these same students penciled her goodbye notes in their new language. 

“I’ve seen how much they’ve flourished,” the first-year teacher – who stands out for her energy and her colorful hair and wardrobe – said in May.  

But Herszbaum-Harding acknowledges she could shower more attention, belief and love on each of her students if there weren’t quite so many of them. She split her school day last year between classes of 24 and 22 students – typical numbers in a district that has seen classroom sizes spike in recent years. 

The popular fourth grade teacher’s classroom size illustrates a problem faced by both Omaha Public Schools teachers and its leaders: The district charged with educating the metro’s highest numbers of students in poverty also has the worst teacher staffing levels.  

A Flatwater Free Press analysis of state education data found OPS student-teacher ratios last year were 12% higher than the average for the other 10 districts in Douglas and Sarpy counties. At the same time, OPS’s poverty rate was three times higher than the other-district average. 

The Flatwater analysis also showed OPS had the highest student-teacher ratio in the state. 

Education experts say it raises questions of fairness when the district educating the most disadvantaged students doesn’t have the teachers to give as much individual attention as more affluent suburban districts. Research has shown smaller class sizes raise test scores, reduce dropouts and improve learning opportunities for students from diverse and low-income families. 

OPS classroom sizes particularly spiked between 2021 and 2023, when fallout related to the COVID-19 pandemic sparked an exodus of hundreds of teachers. The district has struggled to get staffing back up since, despite offering significant boosts in pay. 

“Is it an equity issue? Yes,“ said Ken Bird, a former Westside schools superintendent who for years was the unofficial dean of metro area school leaders. “It shouldn’t be this way.”

Rebounding slowly

As students filed back into schools in August for the new school year, OPS’s sluggish rebound in staffing is continuing. 

OPS as of last year would have needed to add about 400 additional full-time teachers to reach the same student-teacher ratio as other metro districts, the Flatwater analysis shows.

The district has instead added about 50 teachers this fall, preliminary figures show, which leaves the district down hundreds of teachers from four years ago. 

Despite such numbers, OPS has recently given upbeat reports on staffing. District officials say those assessments are based on new math that assumes bigger class sizes, a change they say they made due to the lack of available teachers.

“That’s why you see the reduction in the number of teachers we need,” said Collette Nero, chief talent officer with OPS. “We had to adjust our staffing allocation process based on what was available.” 

OPS Superintendent Matt Ray said in an interview that he and other district leaders are working to get teacher staffing back up. But, he said, OPS simply didn’t have the money to make a big dent in the numbers this school year. 

He cited a Nebraska Department of Education error that led to the district receiving more than $30 million in excess state school aid last year. The state is now requiring the district to pay it back through an aid cut this year. He said that requires raising the property tax levy and operating on a leaner budget.

The district faces other financial challenges, too, including an underfunded pension fund that is requiring the district to pay tens of millions of dollars annually to bring it back to financial health. 

“If 400 qualified teachers showed up today, we would not be able to afford to hire them,” Ray said.

District leaders expect it will take years to build back staffing due to a nationwide teacher shortage and OPS’s financial challenges. 

In the meantime, the district has hired more teacher’s aides – including assigning one to every kindergarten classroom – and given them more training. Paraprofessional numbers last year were up by more than 300 since 2020 – roughly the same number of certified teachers the district is down in that time. 

The district is also working to increase the pool of teachers, including through a “grow your own” partnership with the University of Nebraska at Omaha. And it’s providing new teachers more mentoring to boost retention rates. 

“It will be a slow crawl,” Ray said of staffing improvements. “But we hope to keep building that up.” 

OPS’s current worst-in-the-metro staffing levels stand in stark contrast to a decade ago, when it had the second-best student-teacher ratio of the nine largest metro districts, trailing only Westside. 

As OPS’s student-teacher ratio spiked in recent years, most other districts in the metro were driving theirs down. In some cases, teachers who left OPS took new jobs in those suburban districts.

Classroom sizes have grown despite a pledge from OPS leaders when the district ended desegregation busing in 1999 that it would provide for smaller class sizes for students in schools with high concentrations of poverty. 

It also raises questions about whether the state has done enough to make sure all students have the specific support they need to succeed, said Eric Duncan of Education Trust, a national organization that advocates for equity for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. 

Most state aid formulas provide more assistance to districts with higher poverty levels, and Nebraska is no exception. But Duncan said that increased assistance is often inadequate to meet the added challenge those students and districts face. 

Not only do urban districts need more funding to hire teachers to reduce class sizes, they need money to reconfigure buildings to provide for smaller classes. 

Duncan said he hopes the Flatwater analysis “is really an impetus to say we need to change how we even think about funding and supporting our students who need it the most.” 

 In COVID’s wake

The seeds of OPS’s staffing woes were planted in the 2020-21 pandemic school year. 

Other metro districts started the year with hybrid schedules combining in-person and remote learning. OPS uniquely started fully remote. It didn’t return to full-time, in-person school until February.

The district went into the next school year largely staffed – but the year proved at times chaotic.  

Kids had to learn what it was like to be in school again. Many were behind. Teachers reported increased incidents of discipline and more students dealing with mental health issues. 

“The kids would trickle in in the morning because they were used to logging in and maybe rolling over and going back to sleep or not be as engaged,” Nero said. “It was just really stressful, and I think it just all came to a head.” 

The post-COVID year stressed educators across the country. But the impact on staffing suggests those problems ran deep inside OPS. In the spring of 2022, the district saw 642 teacher retirements and resignations, about 50% more than was typical. It saw another 530 departures the next spring. 

The district scrambled to hire new teachers. It pulled certified staff members out of administrative roles to return them to the classroom. But it still came up short hundreds of teachers. 

One result: larger class sizes – possibly the largest in the state. 

The state does not keep statistics on average class sizes. But it does calculate student-teacher ratios on the elementary and secondary levels by dividing total student enrollment by the number of full-time teachers, including classroom teachers, certified reading and math specialists and instructional coaches. The lower the ratio, the better. 

Among metro districts last school year, OPS had the highest student-teacher ratio in both elementary grades and high school grades. And its high school ratio and overall student-teacher ratio were the highest in the state. 

Ray said the OPS student-teacher ratios and class sizes had started to rise even before the pandemic due to the general national teacher shortage. That shortage, plus an increase in student poverty and building limitations, prompted OPS leaders in 2019 to drop the post-desegregation plan that called for small class sizes in high-poverty “academy” schools. 

Then the pandemic made staffing worse. By fall 2023, the net loss of 420 OPS teachers had spiked the district’s student-teacher ratio by nearly 14% in just two years. 

The district responded by sharply increasing teacher pay. It boosted starting teacher salaries from $44,000 in 2023 to $51,000 today – as much as $10,000 more than some neighboring districts. Veteran teachers received big pay bumps a year later, too. The OPS budget for teacher salaries grew $45 million over two years – an increase of nearly 18%.

The moves helped the district reduce teacher departures, which are now significantly below even pre-pandemic levels. That plus new hires helped the district reverse the staffing slide and boost full-time teacher numbers by 150 over two years. 

But as of last year, that still left the district down 270 full-time teachers from 2021.  

To the moon?

A year ago, OPS launched its “Moonshot” initiative, with a goal of getting all students reading on grade level by 2030. 

Bird said it’s a laudable goal for the district, where English language proficiency rates in 2025 were 40%. But that’s much harder to achieve with larger classes. 

“I think it’s a great objective, but not with those class sizes,” he said. “I don’t know how you do it.”

Tim Royers, president of the Nebraska State Education Association, the state teachers’ union, agreed it makes little sense that the metro district facing the biggest hurdles would have the lowest staffing. 

He and Bird said the district has responded in the right way by boosting pay and getting teachers more help from paraprofessionals.  

“All of those things acknowledge the data that you’ve identified, but also hopefully break the cycle,” he told Flatwater. 

Ray said the pay initiative lured teachers from other districts as well as some retirees back into the profession. But he said both funding and the general shortage of teachers remain barriers. 

In addition to this year’s state aid issue, the district’s underfunded pension fund, which lost $1 billion due to investment mistakes years ago by its district-led board, continues to be a financial albatross. 

The payments the district must pay to bring the fund back to financial health have climbed to $37 million a year – money that if put into teacher salaries would go a long way toward addressing its reduced staffing. 

Nero said it can be more challenging to recruit teachers to work in a large urban school district due to many students’ increased needs. Many teachers have “a special place in their heart” to work with the district’s students and families, she said. 

“I think people like working for an organization with a mission,” Ray said. 

To find more such teachers, the district partnered with UNO on the “grow your own” program. The Teacher Scholar Academy provides funding to a group of high-achieving UNO students pursuing teacher certification in OPS areas of high need. 

OPS added 17 teachers through the program this fall. 

Last year, Mila Herszbaum-Harding landed at Castelar through that same pipeline. 

What he will miss

In May, as the school year wound down in the halls of Castelar, Herszbaum-Harding looked back with satisfaction on her first year of teaching. 

Even though her students live in a high-poverty neighborhood in South Omaha and are trying to learn a new language, she sees them as no less capable, and they proved it. Her students on average were at the 28th percentile in reading at the start of the year and averaged the 48th percentile by year’s end. 

“So they’re not messing around just because the system is not maybe inherently designed for them,” she said. 

The former student at Field Club Elementary and Central High decided at an early age she wanted to teach, inspired by her own OPS teachers. And she knew she wanted to teach in an inner-city school, where she felt her passion could make a difference. 

The fourth grade teacher also knows OPS classrooms have gotten bigger. There were only 16 in her own fourth grade class at Field Club. 

She said a smaller classroom would allow her to focus more on each child. It would make it easier to manage behavior and to tailor instruction to meet individual needs. 

That kind of attention produced one of Herszbaum-Harding’s most memorable moments of the year. 

She asked her students to write a reflection on what they were going to miss most about the fourth grade. One student, a regular “task-avoider” who at times could be difficult, didn’t write that he would most miss recess. Or lunch. He said he would miss his teacher, because she always took the time to make sure he learned something. 

“And he wrote it in perfect grammar,” she said. “That’s what’ll stay with you – knowing that even in the most trying days, it’s for a good reason.”