Amy, I'm not sure if by we, you meant a PTO, or we as parents in general. There is probably not much as a PTA/PTO that you can do to stop them, but as a PTA/PTO you can educate parents about the situation and encourage them to attend board meetings and speak about this as taxpaying citizens. I would just be sure to focus on the real problem, which is a lack of fiscal responsibility. I understand your concern, but I don't think it will hold up under scrutiny as a reason to block your board from making this transition.
I guess I need to clarify our particular situation. The population of our town is 1400 and we are going through a boom with the oil and gas industry which means that our school district in experiencing a windfall in funds. Last year they added a weight room, commons area and classrooms to the highschool and built a half million dollar football stadium. In the past month they have approved the building of a 2 million dollar bus barn and a 10 million dollar swimming pool facility but they are unwilling to add on classrooms to the elementary school. If they move the fifth-graders to the middle school, they will probably have to add on to that building to accomodate the extra children.
I guess what makes me mad is that they not moving the children because they think it will help them acedemically but because they don't want to spend the money on the elementary school. It's not like we don't have the money to make improvements to the elementary school.
Our Middle School is 4th through 8th grade. We keep the 4th & 5th graders to one side of the building and they are never intermingled in any way with the older kids. We have never experienced any problems at all.
We were forced to do this due to space contstraints many years ago. And of course at the time parents were upset for the same reason you mentioned, but it all has worked out.
Unfortunately we do not live in a perfect world where the answer to every situation is the perfect answer for everyone. When any school experiences space constraint problems the school can only do what it feasibly can to resolve the situation.
The worst place to have overcrowding issues is at the elementary ages where smaller class size is the most important and overcrowding in classrooms is the most detrimental to children at the younger ages.
Your concerns are valid and I think you should attend BOE meetings and talk to the Super so that you have a full understanding of the situation and you can ask questions and get answers. But in the end this may be the only solution they have to fix the problem and you may just have to accept it. Thats not to say you need to be happy about it or like it, but you may need to accept it.
How often will the fifth graders actually have classes with the eight graders? My guess would be that they will pass each other in the halls, their lunches and breaks might overlap a bit, and that will be the extent of their interaction. When my son attended a K-8 school, prior to transfering to his current K-3 (which we did solely because he was accepted into the gifted magnate, and was unrelated to grade level split), I did not notice any problems with the kinders or the second graders or the fifth graders interacting with the 8th grade students. In fact, I never particularly noticed the older and younger kids spending that much time together. Most of the schools in my district are K-8. My son's current school is K-3 with 4-8 right across the street. Several of the 4-8 kids attend the after school program at the K-3, and they all seem to get along as kids do - better on some days than others. YMMV, but in my opinion, nothing magical happens during the summer between fifth and sixth grade that will make the sixth graders that much more developmentally mature than a fifth grader... and this is from a mom whose son will be a fourth grade middle schooler next year [img]smile.gif[/img]
If you school board does vote for this, I would suggest setting up a day to have the incoming 5th graders buddy up with a current fifth grader and shadow them to 'learn the ropes', if your school doesn't already provide that.
Our school board is considering moving our fifth-grade students to the middle school because of overcrowding in the elementary school. I am concerned becaues I do not think fifth-graders are developmentally mature enough to interact with eighth-grade students. Does anyone have any experience with a 5-8 middle school? Does it work? What can we do to discourage the move?
Thanks for any input.
