Walking through the halls of Joliet West year after year, it seems to get more crowded as one class departs and a new class embarks on our high school career. This year proves to be no different.

For the 2012-2013 school year, West started out with over three thousand students, 3,005 to be exact, as of August 21, 2012. This number fluctuates on a day to day basis; it can even change every hour, especially during the first few weeks of school. On the first day of school alone, there were 100 new students enrolled. Every day there are also kids who drop out or transfer to different schools.

Even though it may seem like there are so many more students enrolled at West than there were last year, with nearly every class getting filled to the maximum, and lockers becoming more sparse, the enrollment number is actually relatively low. But the enrollment number last year was 2,930, meaning that there are only 75 more students enrolled at West from last year to this school year.

The main reason as to why the number of students who enroll continues to grow every year is that the Joliet area continues to expand. With the amount of houses going up in Joliet and Shorewood more and more kids enroll at Joliet West. Also many students who try to enroll at Central end up getting sent to West because of the limits.

Even though the hallways are crowded and classes are pushing thirty students, it could be worse. The school could be so crowded that we would have to do slip shifts where half of the students go in for half the day and the other goes in for the other half. But the fact of the matter is, is that for the most part everyone gets to their classes on time, there’s never complete holdups in any of the hallways, and there is still space for the student body to grow.