The principal of a Council Bluffs elementary school says it’s like “seeing double.”
Five sets of twins are enrolled in kindergarten at Bloomer Elementary School in Council Bluffs. Doreen Knuth, the school’s principal, says the siblings are split into different classrooms, but the twins have opportunities during the school day to spend time with one another — just in case they’re anxious about being separated.
Knuth was expecting more twins in kindergarten this year. “We had two other sets of twins who were registered to start here in the fall and moved over the summer,” she says, “so we could of even had more.”
Two of the sets of twins in the Council Bluffs kindergarten are identical; the other three sets of twins are fraternal. There are four classes of kindergarteners in the Council Bluffs elementary. “We have all of our twin sets in different classrooms, although a couple of them are in real close proximity to each other,” Knuth says. “But they all have different teachers.”
The number of twins born in the U.S. rose 70 percent between 1980 and 2004, but has held steady since then. In 2006, about three percent of the babies born in America were twins.
(Reporting by Karla James in Omaha/Council Bluffs.)