Green Jello Hotdish

The Waukesha Board of Education has announced a proposal to reconfigure two elementary schools in their district to grade grouping, rather than traditional enrollment boundaries. The theory, they say, is to allocate resources in a more efficient manner while controlling class sizes and being more “child-focused.”

Having benefited from a variety of educational settings — including traditional schools within attendance boundaries, or “neighborhood schools,” mixed-grade classrooms (both as cohort clusters, where first through third grades were in “pods” with the same students, as well as experiencing fourth and fifth grades in the same mixed-grade classroom), grade groupings in middle school and a comprehensive high school with a magnet program — my inclination is that the Waukesha plan will be met with success. As the article points out, libraries and other resources are targeted toward a specific enrollment and much of the wide age gap of bullying on the playground is squelched.

That’s not the question I have: what is with Wisconsin and K-8 schools? Milwaukee’s covered with them. In Minnesota, and I’d venture to say most places, a metropolitan tradition is for K-5 in elementary, 6-8 in middle and 9-12 in high schools. Variations include pre-K and K, 1-3, 4-5, 5-8, etc, but for the most part the “standard” is used. In rural areas with smaller populations and enrollments, a K-6 and 7-12 split is the de facto standard.

But K-8? That’s a huge gap to have in one school. Even splitting that up K-3, 4-8 is huge. I can’t imagine being an 8th grader in school with 4th graders, or vice versa. At my middle school, we had 5th graders in self-contained classrooms on the third floor, while 6-8 operated as the “middle school.” (Originally, the younger students were moved to the building to deal with overcrowding at the nearby elementary school. Subsequently, a district overhaul resulted in shuttering one elementary school and consolidating to single elementary, middle and high schools, and now even 4th graders are at CJMS.) But just by having the 5th graders in the building, it brought a certain “kid” element that caused strife, especially with the 6th graders.

Did the middle school concept skip Southeastern Wisconsin?