PSD sixth and ninth graders moving up

By Dan MacArthur
Fossil Creek Current

Within four years Poudre School District ninth-graders will move to high schools, and sixth-graders in turn will move from elementary to middle schools with a few possible exceptions.

At the same time, adoption of the administration's grade-configuration recommendation opens the door for elementary and junior high schools to convert to a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade model. While that option would be available to any elementary or junior high, it is primarily intended to strengthen the mountain schools in Livermore, Red Feather Lakes and Stove Prairie with small enrollments.

Responding to critics challenging the need for the change, school board member Larry Neal insisted that the reconfiguration will enable the district to better achieve the excellence within its grasp.

"We're very, very close but we're not excellent," he said. "My question is: Is very good good enough?"

But member Jim Hayes in his dissent said he remained concerned about the ability of the administration to "manage the upheaval through the school district" such reconfiguration would create.

The board's 5-2 approval of the revised reconfiguration plan brought to a close a prolonged and emotional debate over what several members said was the most difficult issue they have faced. The matter elicited strong emotions from parents about the appropriate ages for blending together students of varied developmental and educational levels.

Support was strongest for bringing ninth-graders--who already are high-schoolers--into the same buildings with their peers. "Like it or not, ninth-grade is part of high school," parent Robert Patterson told the board.

But opinions were more divided about the wisdom of mixing typically less mature and smaller sixth-graders with more worldly older adolescents who can tower over them.

"I am vehemently opposed to the movement of the sixth grade," Mary Ann Doyle Giesenhagen admonished the board. "Why do we have to push children to grow up so fast?"

Others including Neal, however, maintained that sixth-graders already are prepared and anxious to move onto a more fulfilling educational and social environment in middle schools. "They're going to be OK. There's no harm and potential gain," he said.

Beyond the age and developmental issues, the debate was further complicated by a host of factors inextricably intertwined with each other. Among them are whether the addition of ninth-graders will reduce the availability of elective classes and advanced placement and International Baccalaureate programs in the high schools, how the already crammed Rocky Mountain and Poudre high schools could accommodate a wave of new freshmen, and to what extent course curricula must be modified to meet the needs of new groupings of students of different ages and abilities.

Despite all those concerns and countless others raised during the intensive 15-month development process, the third time proved a charm for the longstanding issue. The configuration approved in April was largely the same as those recommended following two other studies in the last 17 years. Those earlier recommendations were not adopted, however, because of the lack of classroom space with the rapid growth at the time. But circumstances have changed now with flat enrollments projected for the next five years, according to the school district.

The administration's recommended configuration survived a number of unsuccessful modification motions, save for one offered by Neal. Narrowly adopted in a 4-3 vote, it calls for establishing a variance process for "atypical or unique" schools to maintain the current K-6 grade configuration or adopt a K-8 model.

The amendment was particularly aimed at the Harris Bilingual Immersion School. But it could also apply to others meeting the variance standards to be developed--such as the mountain schools or "option schools" without a designated attendance area.

As now scheduled, the district this year will start a boundary review process to begin defining new high school attendance boundaries by April 2008. That effort is aimed at better balancing enrollments among the high schools, especially at Fort Collins and Fossil Ridge high schools, which are operating well under capacity. School readiness plans also will be developed, and elementary and junior high schools will select grade configuration in keeping with the criteria.

In 2008-2009, the feeder school networks will coordinate site and staffing plans to implement the preferred configuration in 2009-2010 or the following year if needed. Middle schools will be implemented when grades six to eight are grouped together. Ninth graders will be confined to a closed campus while the upperclassmen will not.