But school officials say that's harder than it sounds. They've tried it, at Woodville, which took in more than 100 children after Whitcomb Court Elementary School closed in 2006. It's a challenge none of the area's growing suburban districts face.

At Woodville and at Fairfield Court Elementary School, closing a school without opening a new one means two classes in the same classroom at the same time.

And sometimes, trying to speak above the rattling of the fan.

"Small. S-M-A-L-L," says Jackson, one of the B-101 teachers. "The next word is?"

"Tall," mutter a couple of the children, who are kindergarten, firstand second-grade special-education students.

"What do you see in the picture?" Howard asks.

Four of the children peer down -- a dog, one says, as they see a picture of a dog running away from a girl toward two boys; a girl crying, another says.

"Ball. B-A-L-L." Jackson has moved on.

One of Howard's students is still copying the date onto his notebook, 10 minutes after the last of the others finished. Next to him, a little girl gestures with her middle finger and grins.

"Ron. And. Bob. See. Nan. Sob," How ard reads from the sheet. "Sob and Sob and Sob."

There are 14 students, two teachers and three aides in that always-busy room in the five-decade-old Woodville Elementary School.

The curving outer wall has stacks of plastic tubs of teaching materials piled along it. Rolling carts with more books and worksheets are jammed into the corners. There's about a 2-foot-wide space between Jackson's students' desks and Howard's, even less between where Howard's children sit and a small nook for story-time reading.

At Woodville, 13 of 31 rooms are shared by two teachers, as Jackson and Howard do.

"It's a real space challenge," says first-grade teacher Naomi Dilligard, a 19-year veteran who has spent her whole career at Woodville and now shares her room with teacher Samuel Fye's class.

The two teachers had about three days at the start of the school year to figure out how they would manage, she says, watching as one little girl tries -- unsuccessfully -- to inch past where a classmate was perched on the edge of a shoved-back chair in order to show her teacher her reading work sheet.

"These children are in here seven hours a day, except for lunch and 30 or 40 minutes for resource [classes]" such as music class or time in the library, Dilligard says, sighing.

There are 23 children in the room, with two teachers and often two volunteers.

"We can't even fit a line by the wall when it's time to line up for lunch," Dilligard says.

Her half-sized desk, piled more than a foot high with workbooks and classroom supplies, is shoved into a corner, next to overflowing bookshelves. In the opposite corner, by the children's coat rack, two filing cabinets are pushed next to an old wardrobe, with cardboard boxes and plastic tubs stacked two to three high on top.

"I had to get rid of a lot of my materials to fit all the children in," she says.

Woodville, like most city schools, takes advantage of a state program that helps pay for small classes in kindergarten, first, second and third grade. The idea is that having 14 or fewer children per teacher means more of the one-on-one time that gets students off to a fast start with reading, writing and arithmetic.

Doubling up, as Dilligard and Fye do, keeps the ratio the same. But that's not quite the same as a real 14-to-one class, the school's principal, Rosalind C. Taylor, says.

It's something that an overview of the city's classroom use doesn't always show, said Superintendent Deborah Jewell-Sherman.

City school officials calculate that 89 percent of elementary schools space is used for classes or supplemental programs, while 81 percent of middle school space and 97 of high school space is now used.

Richmond has plenty of five-student classes in its high schools, or classes like the 13-pupil special-education fourth and fifth grade that Calandra Coleman and Gene Johnson Coleman teach together. But it also has schools, such as Woodville, where auditoriums are used for classes, or passageways to the boiler room become office space for in-school mental-health workers.

Jewell-Sherman worries that closing schools before new facilities are built will mean more overcrowded schools like Woodville.

School officials had thought that wouldn't happen when they closed Whitcomb at the end of the 2005-06 school year and divided its zone among two other schools.

But they ran into a hard reality of life in Richmond: roughly 40 percent of students move at some point during the year. Woodville was slammed with students nobody expected would end up there. The school has 573 students in facilities that ought to house 530.

To keep that kind of overcrowding from happening again, school officials say Richmond needs to build new schools before closing old ones.

Wilder disagrees.

He says school officials need to close schools before he opens his "City of the Future" program's funds to build new ones.

The result: two years after announcing that a $300 million, five-year City of the Future plan would include funding to build or renovate 15 schools, not one shovelful of dirt as been turned or one blueprint drafted.

School officials have, however, written a plan for school closings and construction, which calls for replacing Woodville with a new school building in its northeast Richmond neighborhood.

But it wasn't the most urgent need the plan identified, especially given the age and overcrowded condition of several South Richmond schools. Under the plan, work on a Woodville replacement wouldn't begin until 2014 at the earliest.

In the meantime, Woodville teachers try to cope.

In classroom A-101, Joanne Joyce is no longer bothering with the stopwatch for the little boy in the blue shirt's timed reading. He is stumbling over the final paragraph of a 200-word story about going to the mall and needs a hand.

"O-R," she said, smiling encouragement. "What does that say?"

Another second-grader flips idly through his workbook, past the "things I see" writing worksheet that the other four children at the kidney-bean-shaped table finished 10 minutes earlier.

One girl from that group comes back to Joyce. She waves her workbook by her face and asks the teacher to show her which pages she was supposed to work on. Joyce does, keeping one hand comfortingly on the blue-shirted boy's wrist, a promise she would soon be with him.

The girl begins another loop; followed by another boy from the timed reading group.

They scooted around behind teacher Deborah Bonds working with one group of a half dozen on measuring the perimeters and areas of squares.

They swing for a moment between two desks, skip past another group of three students writing down the moral of the fable they have just read about the boy who cried wolf.

Finally, the boy flops on the floor, leaning into his chair. The girl crouches on the seat of her chair.

And the boy in blue tried, once again, to read aloud his story, to beat Joyce's stopwatch and earn his star.
Contact David Ress at (804) 649-6051 or dress@timesdispatch.com.