Tamaqua Area School District officials are ready for the start of school on Thursday, its incoming superintendent said.

Dr. Stephen Toth told school directors Tuesday night that in-service days were underway, parking passes for the upper grades have been distributed, and new high school schedules will be ready for start of classes.

Fall sports and activities started Monday, and football players started heat acclimatization three days prior, he said. Meet the Raiders Night is set for Aug. 26.

“Various open houses are occurring,” Toth said, noting that middle school open house was going on that night.

The board met in the auditorium, instead of the large group instruction room, to accommodate the middle school open house.

“We’re looking forward to the start of the ’26-27 school year,” Toth said after the meeting. “You know we have some challenges with space at our elementary school that we’re working through.”

He explained that they started in July working on balancing the number of children between elementary schools to keep class sizes down.

“We’re trying to balance our student to teacher ratio,” Toth said. “We don’t want to have students in classes of 30 to 1, especially at those early levels. It’s just making sure that ratio is balanced to deliver good instruction.”

The district has enough teachers, he said, but we needed to shift some students from town to West Penn Elementary.

“Our staff was extremely receptive,” he said. “They’re excited to go and we just want to provide the best education for our students.”