a first step...proposals (2010)

An Unfinished Framework for Moving Forward in SAD58:


BASIC OUTLINE


Facilities

Keep all 5 schools open with changes in use of space as needed.

Mothball individual classrooms to save on heating, cleaning and upkeep if decreasing census warrants.

No new construction. Pay off remaining debt over next 5 years and incur no new debt.

Remodel only as strictly necessary to maintain buildings, improve energy efficiency, or comply with legal codes.


Staff

Continue to use retirements/resignations to move gradually to a new staffing model based more on student/teacher ratios and less on classroom/subject assignments.
Share assignments and spread out responsibilities both within and between schools, taking care not to increase already high work loads.

Commit professional development funding where needed to make this transition.

Continue to take advantage of opportunities to share specialists with surrounding districts.


Students

Keep K-8 in their towns.

Encourage some movement for 7-8 or 6-8 between schools or to a designated wing at MtA. This movement would be time-limited and could allow greater opportunity in particular subject areas (e.g. science, sports, studio and performing arts, foreign language, writing, other subject area workshops, peer tutoring, field trips, etc).

Keep 9-12 at MtA, but create satellite high school rooms in each K-8 school to facilitate programs which thrive with local involvement (mentoring, apprenticeships, peer tutoring, mentor tutoring). Residence at those satellite areas would be time-limited.


Transportation: Consider 2 mid-day shuttle loops on alternate afternoons to facilitate easy exchange of 7-12 (or 6-12) students between schools.


Technology

Enhance classroom links to maximize sharing of subject-area teachers and connections between children while minimizing travel requirements.

Continue to improve student access to resources beyond the district.
Community Involvement: Remove existing roadblocks to community participation in education to make better use of both physical and human resources.


Leadership

Return responsibility for education decisions to classrooms and communities---teachers and parents.

Recognize that district-wide administration and shared principals will specialize mostly in business functions, record-keeping, and satisfying legal/political requirements.

Establish a forward-looking professional evaluation program based on teaching skills, not test scores.


Tax relief: Recognize that retirement of debt, reductions in staff, sharing of administration, cooperation with all surrounding districts, and greater community involvement will create large savings over time. This will be gradual---not dramatic---but substantial, and will improve both educational opportunities and efficient use of limited resources while preserving and improving social and economic potential of all our towns.


GENERAL PRINCIPLES:


Closing schools is economic madness.

Good jobs are outsourced to surrounding communities. This is no less destructive to our towns than shipping manufacturing jobs overseas has been to our country.

Fewer wage-earners in town translates to a smaller tax base and lowered property values.

A town without a school does not attract new business.

A town with no school cannot provide either customers or labor to existing business.


Closing schools is not good for education.

Thousands of hours riding a bus is neither educational nor economical.

Research confirms that the most successful schools are those closely connected to their communities.

The most successful students are those with parents involved in the school. The child who sees her/his parents, grandparents, and neighbors in school knows that adults value education.


Closing schools is destructive to family life.

Towns with no kids lose their spirit. Children gravitate to the towns where they attend school.

When parents are physically unable to tend to their children in school, the schools become surrogate parents and family life suffers.

School closures often lead to siblings attending geographically separated facilities, further reducing possibilities for family involvement.


SPECIFICS:

Changes required to implement this plan can be gradually phased over many years instead of requiring mass movements of school populations, sudden changes to facilities, and incurred capital expenditures we can't afford. This plan is people-driven rather than facility-driven, and could evolve from the bottom up as needs arise and possibilities reveal themselves. Since it is people driven, it can be fine-tuned as we learn what works and what does not. It is a long-term plan rather than a short-term fix and can be either amended or reversed as the need arises.


K-8 Facilities

All four schools would be used, but with many possibilities for reconfiguration. All of our buildings are in excellent shape with ample space for flexible use.

K-5 or K-6 would stay exclusively in their town schools. Middle-school (6-8 or 7-8) would also remain close to home most of the week, but with some possibility for movement between towns or gathering at a central location. This movement might occur on alternate afternoons, on one full day a week, seasonally when the roads are clear, or by any other model.

Keeping a school presence in each town is both feasible and desirable as we start to look at our schools more as community centers and less as remote outposts of a central district school system. A community school---the one-room schoolhouse grown up---is not a radical experiment. It is the way most cultures and times have treated education, and the move away from that was itself the (failed) experiment. Preserving a school presence in every town will be especially important as transportation costs rise. It may become simply impossible to bus kids great distances in decades to come, yet information technology will allow us to maintain top-quality education in every building.

Traditionally all over the world, and certainly in our towns, numbers of teachers required was based on numbers of students in the school, not on the number of grades or subjects taught. Depending on how calculations are made, New England maintains about a 12-to-1 average student/teacher ratio. In years past, when money was not so tight, the ratio was lower. The ratio is lowest for the youngest children and higher for the oldest. That can be our starting point. Simply look at the numbers of children and the numbers of teachers in each building, and our work becomes apparent. In each building, for each year, solutions will vary. In some situations combining particular grades may make sense. In others a collection of overlapping, more fluid groupings might be attractive. In still others, a school might want to combine wide ranges of ages into one group and have them move between teachers according to the subject expertise of the individual teachers. In some circumstances, very low ratios can be justified for small groups with defined needs. This can be left to the school and its parents. Where allocations of resources within a school lead to staffing ratios that are out of line, some justification must be made, but otherwise these decisions about groupings are best made close to the classrooms and communities, not by a district administration.

A 12-to-1 ratio clearly does not mean a class size of 12. In some cases classes might be smaller, but in most cases they will be larger. Larger class sizes can be mitigated somewhat by strategic use of ed. tech. staff and parent volunteers to create smaller, fluid groupings, but for schools to attract any community volunteers they must remain friendly and inviting to the community, not exclusionary and fortified against imagined security threats.

At the middle school level, we are used to thinking of one teacher per subject area, but this is hardly necessary. Where the law requires classrooms to have “highly qualified” subject area teachers, this can be accomplished through sharing of those teachers between classrooms and schools, with supervising teachers traveling or using technology for off-site instruction and relying on other teachers on site for individualized work. Where specialized equipment needs make duplication expensive, (e.g. science labs, sports equipment, instrumental music, etc.) or larger groupings enable enhanced programming (e.g. theater, sports teams, language instruction), middle school students can come together. It becomes important for this reason to create a satellite middle school space at MtA---perhaps 2 or 3 classrooms. If buses bring middle school students to MtA for a half day, they can be used very efficiently move 9-12 students back to their towns for other needs discussed below.


9-12 Facilities

MtA is clearly a treasure that should not be squandered. Educators across the country agree now that the advantage of small schools' individual attention far outweighs any advantages large schools once had in diversity of offerings. Kids do not fall through the cracks at MtA, and this fact is recognized widely as large schools elsewhere are now broken into smaller units. Any large school advantage remaining around efficiencies of scale and diversity of electives decreases each year as the Internet becomes a greater leveler, so we are left with only the advantages of social inclusion and higher participation in smaller schools and none of the traditional disadvantages.

We were once led to fear that maintaining our 40-year-old school to last us into the future would be prohibitively expensive, but that is simply not true. An architects' study commissioned by the School Board last year put that fear to rest once and for all. All involved were surprised how little it would cost to upgrade the building to last for another 25 years, with changes that can be made over a period of time as we can afford them.

We are clearly in excellent shape to save a school that frequently wins recognition as a trend-setter.

So, MtA should remain the home base for 9-12, but with satellite high school centers (one room per school) established in each town using existing excess space in elementary schools. Some of the most valuable 9-12 programs involve working with mentors in the community, apprenticeships in local businesses, or service to towns and younger town children. These programs are not only important in the education of students, but also in the life of our towns. Many of these connections are difficult to forge or sustain with no 9-12 presence outside Salem. A dedicated presence in each K-8 facility for high school students would go a long way toward solving the problem. Besides, it would give older kids more of a stake in their towns than they have now with no added bus time.

Students not engaged in formal programs can use the satellite space for study, Internet research, writing coaching, or endless other possibilities limited only by imagination. A return to the 9-12 students' K-8 building can be a scheduled event. It would probably be neither well used nor popular at first, but that would change as people, programs, and imagination filled the gap.


Community Use

A dedicated central gathering place in each elementary school could easily be created for homeschooling families and community groups offering educational opportunities to children. Responsibility for daily operation and maintenance of that area would be shared between a volunteer coordinator and homeschooling groups. Such a space would not only give more community ownership to the schools, but also ensure that community resources become known and available to students. Increased homeschoolers' use would be win-win for both sides, since a well-equipped, no strings attached community gathering place enhances homeschooling, while involvement of homeschoolers in more activities brings added life—and potential funding—to the school.

While community groups already make frequent use of school buildings for meetings, auctions, storm shelter, fundraisers, and other events, the possibilities for greater use is limitless. As one example, the UMF Fitness Center invites older neighbors in early each morning to walk laps. (This has also been done in Stratton.) All our schools could do the same. Give them coffee, chairs to sit in and chat, and a warm place to socialize and they'll return the favor by supporting the schools and helping their grandchildren. We do far too little to create allies in the non-school population, and this could be a wonderful additional use for under-crowded facilities with clear spin-off benefits for children seeing older neighbors in their schools.


Education

Children learn at different rates and different ages, so age groupings are artificial and often damaging to development. Single grade classrooms are also hard to justify as numbers drop and class sizes vary wildly from year to year and school to school. As a district we have long supported small class sizes as a means of promoting individual attention and tailoring lessons to students. We can identify a ratio that makes educational sense and is financially supportable, and then determine the teaching resources needed to support that number...but only if we multi-age classrooms. Schools that have done this have taken two or three years to adjust, but then have not wanted to change back. Children learn best from each other, and some of the biggest gains are made by peer teachers since they must learn their material well to help others. It is a boon for all kids, though very difficult for teachers to learn new styles of teaching which protect them from burnout yet give each child an individual plan. The transition can only succeed with much help to teachers and buy-in from parents. As teachers, parents, and even children get more comfortable with this new style of classroom, more possibilities open for fluid groupings according to subject and the needs of the students.

We should not forget that children usually learn best from each other, and even peer teachers benefit from having to learn material well enough to explain it. This is equally true for first graders sharing a reading space and 12th graders tutoring 5th graders. In most settings, we not only fail to take advantage of this, but we actively prevent it by separating students by grade. An observer from a century past would find that incomprehensible.


Social development

The 6-8 population is starting to reach out socially and feel the school walls closing in. By seventh grade it's an itch, and by eighth it's almost painful. While a center for each town's 6-8 students close to home is important, it is also vital for our small classes to mix together across schools. This can be accomplished by using space at MtA for classes and events requiring larger or more specialized spaces, treating Salem as a mixing pot for all district middle schoolers. It might be logical, for example, to teach all 6-8 science labs at MtA.


Teaching staff

We would gradually move from grade-level classrooms to multi-age classrooms at the K-8 level in all schools, regardless of numbers of children at each grade level. The 6-8 group would become separate and distinct from k-5 in groupings. The district would make a commitment to necessary professional development to make that transition. Teachers would then be given some stability in assignments rather than being reassigned annually to different grade levels and responsibilities as numbers change. Teachers would also be given flexibility to change groupings according to subject and over time to meet the changing social, academic, and personal needs of their students. Changes in groupings would be facilitated by ed techs, also supported with professional development to fill this role. The district would make a commitment to fund regular and formal professional observation/evaluation for all teachers, not just new teachers. Professional development and evaluation will help all teachers grow...or encourage those who cannot to seek a different career. This is an area that must be encouraged, monitored and adequately funded by the board.


Misc. Possibilities

Move the Central Office out of the PES and into the portable behind MtA. If we form an AOS, this can house some combined functions, provide local office space for shared administrators, or geographically central space for overflow functions not covered by the AOS. Make room back in the main MtA building for the classrooms now out back. The present supt's office (old PES library) could have a good use as an attractive homeschoolers/community center, separated from other classrooms and with easy direct outside access.

It may not be necessary to cook full meals at MtA every day if a significant group of 9-12 students go back to their towns on alternate afternoons...and can eat there. On those days, bag lunch alternatives might be provided for those who need them at MtA, and a smaller kichen staff can do prep work on “off days” to give them a jump on “on days.” A long-shot, but still a possibility.

While excess classroom space could be mothballed, that would be an unlikely need. The movements above will require identification of 2 empty classrooms in each K-8 building and 3 or 4 at MtA. The K-8 space will open if we multi-age. The MtA space is coming available as enrollments there decrease.