OPINION:
The solution to the difficult transition between middle school and high school is to eliminate the middle school model.
I’m a recently retired teacher who taught 30 years in a rural kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school. Don’t confuse rural with problem-free, however. Eighty percent of our children were on assistance and had most of the problems associated with urban schools, except race-related ones. For many of those children, school was the best part of their day, and as a community, we worked hard to keep it that way.
K-8 schools offer a family setting where students grow up knowing their classmates, teachers and parents. On the playground, we’d see eighth-graders play kickball or foursquare with first-graders. Older kids had no clue it wasn’t “cool” to play with younger children. We also had cross-age tutoring and a lower/upper grade buddy program.
There is an argument about not having the higher-skilled, departmentalized teachers you find in middle school programs, but our test scores consistently showed little difference in achievement. We enjoyed a more emotionally centered student body that was more prepared for departmentalized, less personal high school programs.
DENNY PRICE
Pine Grove, Calif.
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