A middle school for sixth graders only

Teaching Pre K-8, Nov/Dec 1999 by Elliot, Ian

Teaching K-8 takes you to Dana School - and sixth grade Utopia

Dana School in Point Loma, California (near San Diego) is a middle school with a difference. It's not a difference you can actually see, though. Just the opposite. Its what you don't see that sets Dana apart from most middle schools - and what you don't see are any fifth, seventh and eighth graders on campus.

The sixth graders have the school all to themselves.

No, it's not a pilot project; rather, chalk it up to logistics, pure and simple. Local elementary schools - eight of them feed into Dana -were running out of space while Dana School was running on empty, having been abandoned in the early 1980's. Really empty. At one point, the school was being used as a training site for a local SWAT team.

The solution? Move all of the sixth grades out of the elementary schools and into a completely refurbished Dana. The move was completed last year and in August 1998, Dana opened its doors to some 420 sixth graders.

The strategy has had several benefits in addition to giving the elementary schools some breathing room. The most obvious, perhaps, is that all teachers are on the same wave length at Dana. As a result, they share materials, strategies and curriculum goals.

The approach has lessened the occurrence of some behavior problems, too. One classroom teacher put it this way: "I love it. It's so much fun being in a straight sixth grade school. No students above the kids telling them they're dorks and nobody below them they can pound. There are very few problems. It's sixth grade Utopia!"

Utopia or not, Dana is in good shape as it progresses through its second year as a middle school. The students are doing well on statewide and districtwide tests; the teachers are committed and enthusiastic; and the community is involved. No, make that deeply involved. Even before the school opened last year, members of the community had formed the Dana Association for the purpose of raising funds to purchase materials and support the school's enrichment programs.

The community also strongly supported the restoration of Dana, paying for every tree and shrub on the school grounds.

Hand-picked faculty. It's not often a new principal gets to hand-pick his or her teachers. Principal Jerry Hooper, however, wa able to do just that.

"I put together a committee of parents and a lead teacher and together we interviewed staff. We selected an incredible group of people. They came to us from all over town. We took a number of them right out of Point Loma schools." (It should be noted that Jerry wasn't exactly flying blind when it came to interviewing Point Loma teachers. He served as principal of two other schools before coming to Dana. Both were in Point Loma.)

"We had some criteria when we interviewed," Jerry continued. "We wanted folk who were committed to excellence, people who, in the process of the interview, revealed that high expectations were part of their thinking. For the most part, we picked folks who like working with this age level."

Team teaching. Dana School has 15 classroom teachers, who are divided into seven teams. Four of these teams form a GATE cluster (Gifted and Talented Education). Within the four teams, one team is what they call a "GATE seminar."

Three teams (or seven teachers) teach the regular sixth grade curriculum. One-half of each team teaches math and social studies; the other half, reading and language arts. One team has three teachers. Together, they teach math, social studies and language arts to their three classes.

There's also a class for learning handicapped students, who spend at least part of each day mainstreamed into regular classrooms; and a resource specialist program, whose teachers work closely with classroom teachers to make sure that resource students and regular students are on the same track.

Teachers are given one prep period a week to organize their schedules and strategies; the school hopes to be able to increase it to two prep periods a week in the near future. Also, there's a modified day on Thursday, when departments meet every two weeks to design a planned curriculum.

One-on-one. Jerry Hooper is not the kind of principal who spends the day sequestered in his office. Instead, he regularly spends a couple of hours a day in classrooms, either observing or getting one-on-one with kids.

He said "If I'm going to be an instructional leader, it's important for me to be in the classrooms doing the same kind of things the teachers are doing. Otherwise, I'm out of the loop and I don't have any credibility." Extra effort. Dana provides its students with many opportunities to excel, both in and out of school. For example:

- Community service. Each student is expected to complete 12 hours of community service a year. Exit exhibitions. Kids are required to tell a group about a research project they've been working on. This is to prepare them for the senior exhibitions they'll face in high school. Projects. Students work on different-- projects throughout the year. For example, one was a four-week writing project that involved comparing two of Gary Paulsen's books; another consisted of studying ancient Greece and preparing 14 exhibits for an end-of-the-year Olympic fair.