Isolating 9th graders: Separate schools ease the academic and social transition for high school-bound students

School Administrator, March, 2002 by Jennifer Newton Reents

At one point, the Centralia City Schools District, which has about 1,500 students and is located about 65 miles east of St. Louis, consisted of nine K-8 centers before a new middle school was created to respond to desegregation orders.

A 5th grade center was set up in a predominately minority area of the city of Centralia to eliminate what had been a virtually all-black school, Griffin says. "From the beginning, the idea of housing all fifth graders in one building was received in a positive way from teachers and parents alike."

In Derby, Kan., a suburb of Wichita, the Derby Sixth Grade Center has been in existence for eight years and serves about 500 students. The district opened it to deal with a population bulge.

"Both Derby High School and Derby Middle School were overflowing with students," says Superintendent Michael Pomarico. "The determination was made to propose a bond issue to build a new high school. When that was approved, conditions that were also attached to the bond issue were to move DMS into the old high school building and to move all sixth grade students, as our elementaries were also very crowded, into the old DMS building."

Pomarico says the district spent a great deal of time researching the 6th-grade center concept.

"What was found was that there were very few 6th-grade centers across the country," he says. "Because of the lack of research on this topic the primary research focus turned to looking at middle school philosophy."

Occupancy Dictates

Single-grade schools are nothing new in Ardmore, Okla. In fact, the Ardmore City Schools has operated a 6th-grade center and a prekindergarten/ kindergarten center for about 20 years. There are currently about 475 students at the kindergarten center and 229 at the 6th-grade school in the city of about 28,000 people located midway between Oklahoma City and Dallas. The district serves about 3,200 students.

Geneva Marlack, Ardmore's director of personnel, says the size of buildings, class sizes and the need to occupy a building rather than leave it empty have dictated a lot of the decisions in the past and were a big part of the decisions to create the kindergarten and 6th grade centers. "In addition, we wanted students from the five elementary schools to come together at one site and become acquainted with each other before entering middle school," she says.

Opening single-grade centers for these districts was not without its challenges.

"Our belief was that this would provide opportunities for us to get parents involved in their child's education at the earliest stages," Centralia's Griffin says. "Parental involvement is critical, and it seems that today's parents lack the needed skills for proper, parenting. The board of education wanted to eliminate the stereotypes that existed in various schools. The idea that one school was better than another evolves as higher socioeconomic levels of families reside in a given area compared to the, 'families on the wrong, side of the tracks.' Attendance centers have all but eliminated this problem."