Mason City is school seeing double

By Deb Nicklay | Monday, October 09, 2006

MASON CITY, Iowa — The same first-letter names are the first clue, a litany of likenesses: Brady and Bailey, Summer and Spencer, Brandon and Blake.

The names signal a multitude of multiples at Harding Elementary School this year.

Harding is home to no less than eight sets of twins, four of them in kindergarten, two in second grade and one set each in third and fourth grades.

Half are identical.

“I haven’t been here a long time, but I would think this is a bit unusual,” said Principal Mike Penca.

“We would have had one more set in kindergarten, but we lost them before school started,” said secretary Sandra Skipper, who provided name tags for each child to help a reporter do this story.

If there is confusion, the twins think nothing of it. Even at their ages, they have heard all the comments about twins.

“Some people don’t know that we’re twins and they’re pretty surprised if they see us on the playground,” said Blake Weitzel, 8. “They get mixed up.”

Sometimes, even the teachers are surprised.

Kindergarten teacher Vicki Zweibohmer — who has half of three sets of twins in her classroom — said she was beginning to get concerned one day recently when one of the twins, Lucas Linderman, 5, came late to the playground for recess.

“I said, ’Lucas, where have you been?’ And he just looked at me and said, ’I’m Logan.’ I get caught up in it, too.”

Head scratching over who is who is not uncommon.

Paraeducator Jane Bergan can only tell Adrianna and Annalisa Jackson, 5, apart because one wears shoes with a pink stripe and the other, purple.

“And one’s pigtails is just a hair shorter than the other,” she said.

Administrators separate twins into different classrooms, said Penca, to allow students the chance to establish new friendships outside of the all-important twin relationship.

There are challenges. Some parents want their twins to have the same homework so teachers work closely to keep lesson plans on track with each other.

These twins said they don’t mind the separation.

Brady Weitzel, 7, said it keeps him from locking horns with his sister, Bailey.

“We fight a lot,” he said.

“Yeah, we do,” admitted Bailey.

Summer Roney, 9, found her sentences being finished by her twin, Spencer, while they were in preschool.

“When they pulled us apart and put us in different classrooms, that stopped,” she said.

Establishing a single identity was important.

“She is 11 minutes older, but I’m taller,” said Brady, proudly.

Still, some need to know the other is there during the day.

Sam and Mac Kahler, 5, seek out each other in the lunchroom or in the hallway “just because,” said Sam.

There are other connections among the twins.

Summer and Spencer are in classrooms whose teachers — Nancy Wiltse and Karen Johnson — are sisters.

“They aren’t twins, but they look alike,” said Summer.

There is another paired relationship that can really get you crazy: Sam and Mac Kahler are cousins to Brandon and Blake Weitzel.

In the past two decades, the number of multiple births in the United States has jumped dramatically.

Between 1980 and 2000, twin births increased 74 percent, and the number of higher order multiples (triplets or more) has increased fivefold, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Today, about 3 percent of babies in this country are born in sets of two, three or more, and about 95 percent of these multiple births are twins.

About one-third of the increase in multiple gestations is due to an increase in women over age 30 (who are more likely to conceive multiples) having babies, according to the March of Dimes. The remainder of the increase is due to the use of fertility-stimulating drugs and assisted reproductive techniques such as in vitro fertilization.

According to the most recent survey of assisted reproductive programs in the United States, 56 percent of births resulting from these procedures were multiples.