4,300 and counting at West Orange High School

It’s 9 o’clock Monday morning at West Orange High School, and Bill Floyd makes his way through the courtyard on his first day of classes at the most-crowded public school in Orange County. The new principal said WOHS has roughly 4,300 students on its main and ninth-grade campuses, which were built for a combined capacity of 4,000.

“You take a step, and then side step to get around somebody, take a step, side step to get around somebody,” Floyd said of maneuvering around overcrowded campuses.

There are 1,013 students alone in the Class of 2017.

Floyd isn’t too worried about leading the masses, though. In his first few years as principal of Apopka High, students numbered more than 4,000.

This is West Orange’s final year as the largest Orange County Public Schools high school. For the 2017-18 academic year, about 1,860 ninth-, 10^th- and 11^th-graders will be rezoned and reassigned to the new WOHS relief school presently under construction at 5523 Winter Garden-Vineland Road, Windermere.

“The current challenge is to make sure that every student is served with an individualized education,” Floyd said. “And that’s really hard when you’re working with such a large number.

“It’s real important that at least one adult on the campus makes some sort of personal connection with that person,” he said. “It could be me, heck, it could be the custodian. Someone needs to take an interest in that kid and make him know he’s valued.”

The principal likened education to customer service: “It needs to be a collection of people that need to help folks get what they came in for.”

To do that, changes were made for this school year. A third lunch period was added, stretching lunch times from 11:02 a.m. to 12:23 p.m.

Four portable classrooms were also placed on the main campus near the stadium and 900 Building.

“It kind of eats into our ticket-selling area,” Floyd said. “But we had to.”

More student parking was made available inside the perimeter gates near the bus loop. Floyd said that while it’s not an ideal solution — vehicles are not permitted to leave until the last bus pulls out —it will work for some students.

West Orange has seven additional employees this year, too: a language arts teacher, two science and two social studies teachers, one permanent substitute teacher and one security guard.

The school didn’t need to worry about purchasing and installing more lockers for the influx of students because nearly all of the textbooks are digitized and many of the lockers currently on campus aren’t being used because of OCPS’ digital format.

Contact Amy Quesinberry Rhode at [email protected].