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Watching the Tucson Unified School District is often like tuning in to Roseanne Rosanadana from Saturday Night Live: It's always something. If it's not one thing it's another.

That's what came to mind when we heard about parents at Dunham Elementary School last week protesting the transfer of two teachers to other schools. "Save our teachers," they said.

The parents are upset their school is losing two teachers because they're needed at other schools that have too many students per class.

Dunham parents are blaming open enrollment, which allows families to send their kids to schools outside their neighborhoods. Some schools lose kids, while others are bursting at the seams.

Twenty-two schools are losing at least one full-time equivalent position because of lower enrollment than anticipated, said TUSD spokeswoman Chyrl Hill Lander. Staffing levels are set based on the prior year's enrollment, plus registration changes that come in over the summer — provided parents' open-enrollment changes are sent to the losing and receiving school.

Dunham started last year with 323 students, but it had 274 as of Friday.

TUSD goes through this exercise every year, shifting teachers and classrooms during the first few weeks of school. District officials predict school enrollments as best they can, but try as they might, there are always surprising population shifts or students who arrive after the start of school.

The result is that some schools have classrooms with plenty of space while others are cramming kids into classrooms.

The district has an obligation to make the educational experience as equitable as possible for all students. It's unfair to let three teachers divvy up 22 students, as was the case at Dunham with three kindergarten classes of seven or eight students, while teachers in other schools must manage classrooms of more than 30 kids.

Every parent would love to have a child in a class of eight students, and it's likely teachers would like it also because it allows for more individual attention. If we could design a public-school system from the ground up, we'd build that kind of student-to-teacher ratio into it. But it's not realistic and it's not reasonable under our existing education system to expect that one group of students should benefit greatly at the expense of others stuck in overcrowded classrooms.

It's easy to be myopic about these things — few things within a parent's control are more important than their children's education. Perhaps the Dunham parents are sensitive to the tag of "underenrolled," given that Wrightstown Elementary, also on the East Side, was targeted for closure last year because of its tiny size.

We hope that those upset by the teacher shifts recall the not-so-distant past when TUSD families couldn't participate in open enrollment like families in other districts because of the federal desegregation court order it had to operate under.

TUSD isn't forcing parents to send their kids to other schools — parents are making choices. TUSD doesn't bus kids who go to another school under open enrollment, so these families are deciding that choosing a different school is worth the hassle. Those decisions have ramifications for other families.

We hope that Dunham parents, along with those upset at other schools, will be able to put these teacher shifts into perspective and continue to be involved with their children's education.

Lawmakers set the budget that directly affects how many teachers a district can afford to hire. They're the ones who need to know that parents and voters are watching and that they care about their local public schools.