I would have never agreed to that after spending two years on private school tuition to meet my child's educational needs. Class size is the principal's problem to solve. Would he/she have suggested that to a family moving into the district with a rising 2nd grader? "Oh, we are out of room, so your child will have to repeat 1st grade since there's space there." Good grief. Logic be damned.
Now that you mention it, my eldest signed up for honors pre-calculus in tenth grade. The class should have been small-ish, but lots of kids had signed up for non-honors pre-calculus, so the school decided to move some of them into the honors class because of class size issues. I'm not sure how many got moved; my son knew 3 of them personally, but says that there were more.
Fast forward to early January. The teacher got injured and couldn't work. None of the subs could teach pre-calc. One of them told the kids (while doing her knitting), "Honors students can teach themselves." But of course...they weren't all honors students, and even if they were, if they could teach themselves, there wouldn't be much need to take a class, would there?
Fast forward to early March, and they were finally given an online system to use. But...they had to complete the ENTIRE one-year course by Memorial Day (unless they were seniors, in which case it had to be done a few days earlier). And they lost a week to standardized testing in there, to boot.
I have no idea how things shook out for the non-honors and other students, but I remember my son telling me in mid-May that a lot of kids still had so much of the course left that finishing was effectively impossible for them. I felt then, as I do now, that the school cheated children out of a learning experience that they had a right to get.
