Blatchley Middle School students walk down the hallway in between class periods. The school is revamping its schedule for the 2012-13 school year. (KCAW photo/Ed Ronco)
Students at Blatchley Middle School next year will notice big changes to their schedules.
The school is rearranging the way it structures its day. Administrators told the Sitka school board that it will improve the experience for students.
When the bell rings at Blatchley Middle School, students pour out of classroom doors into the hallway, off to their next class.
Next year, they’ll be doing a little more of this.
Right now, the middle school operates on something called a block schedule. Instead of attending the same seven classes every day for about an hour, those classes are stretched out over a longer period of time, and take place every other day. They call them “A” Days and “B” Days.
It’s not bad, says Principal Joe Robidou, until you hit the weekend.
“And so the time between classes gets to be four days,” Robidou said. “With our age of kid, I think two days is sometimes stretching it as far as the kid not seeing the teacher, not seeing the subject matter…”
If you have a B-day on a Friday, the next time you see those teachers could be Tuesday of the next week. Throw in a sick day or an in-service day and the time can be even longer.
So, next year, Blatchley will return to the traditional seven-period school day. Students will see all their teachers every day, and work on each subject every day.
“This every day idea gives us a chance to build relationships, to foster growth emotionally – not only academically, but these kinds of relationships we always want to build with kids are going to get strengthened if the kid sees you every day,” he said.
Robidou told the Sitka School Board on Tuesday that there are other reasons, too: Going to seven periods a day adds 30 minutes a week to every class. The shorter class time – about 50 minutes – is better suited to middle school attention spans, he said. The school can operate on one set of school bells, with students transferring classes at the same time. They have more frequent contact with not only their teachers, but the subjects they’re studying. They get physical education daily – the list goes on.
A group of sixth graders in language arts and math have gone through both subjects every day this year. Robidou says the group of students who had each subject daily had a slightly higher grade point average than those who followed the block schedule.
Still, Robidou told the school board that some parents have concerns about the change.
“Some of the concerns that did come up: Hallway transitions. We’re moving from six to eight in a day, including before and after school,” he said.
Hallway transitions, Robidou says, are when conflicts between students are more likely to occur. To address the concern about having more of them, Robidou says they’ll probably rearrange where classrooms are located in the building, to give students shorter routes between classes. And he says teachers will remain vigilant in the hallway when the transitions occur.
School Board member Cass Pook says she received an e-mail from a parent concerned about special needs students: If Blatchley moves to a shorter daily class period, how will that affect students who might need more time to grasp a particular concept?
Blatchley assistant principal Ben White was a special ed teacher for a dozen years before taking the number two job at the middle school.
“All the research, not just with our typical learners, but with our special needs learners also, indicates very strongly that more frequent review and more frequent assessment is the best way to teach and have it last,” White said.
Board president Lon Garrison said he wanted to be careful about not micromanaging the middle school, but that he and the board wanted to hear more, especially once the school has gone through a year on the new schedule.
Back to that hallway at Blatchley. As students stop at their lockers and teachers stand watch near their doors, a seventh grader named Oliver notices my microphone. I ask him what he thinks about the new schedule.
“I don’t want to do it,” he says. “Say you have a favorite class on ‘B’ Day, then you don’t get to look forward to it. It doesn’t have as much diversity.”
By diversity, he means variety in what happens every day. Time will tell whether Oliver changes his mind and whether the schedule makes a new learning environment at Blatchley Middle School.
