Finally deciding the first part of its approach to tackling declining enrollment, the Onteora School Board unanimously voted January 24 to move sixth graders from its elementary schools to the middle school in Boiceville. Next, it will have to decide which elementary school or schools to close, and when.
The board voted 6-0 to move the sixth grade starting with the 2024-25 school year. Trustee Sarah Hemmingway-Lynch abstained because she has a child who will be affected.
Meanwhile, parents at the meeting complained of students afraid to use the bathroom because of vaping, drug use and fights.
Currently, the Woodstock and Phoenicia elementary schools serve kindergarten through third grade, while fourth- through sixth-graders attend the Bennett School next to the junior high and high school.
Before the school board restructured them in 2012, Bennett, Phoenicia and Woodstock housed kindergarten through sixth grade.
“The six-eight model allows students to develop a greater sense of affiliation with the school and the staff and that feeling of a middle schooler,” explained assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction Stephanie Laffin. “Students will have more time to build lasting relationships at a critical time in development. In addition, academically six-through-eight staff will have more time to identify, assess and implement supports and interventions. The model enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of curricular articulation and staff communication. New York State standards are often grouped to grades six through eight. Academically, sixth grade is generally seen as secondary content.”
Laffin said the middle-school model allowed more flexibility for electives not possible in the elementary-school environment.
Superintendent Victoria McLaren said she recognized the emotions and feelings of parents for the students who have been affected by the pandemic for their entire lifetimes. But she reminded the meeting that the district has lost more than 1000 students since the 2003-04 school year, and was continuing to decline in population.
“I wouldn’t ever say that we should be able to fit 1100 kids in our middle school/high school, but we certainly are not overcrowded at this time,” McLaren said. “We can only project out for so far, because when babies are born, then we assume that they’re going to stay with us and enter our halls in a few years. This does not take into account any potential enrollment booms. But given our very real issues with housing in this district, I don’t know that even if we saw people move here, there’s nowhere for a significant population to live at this point.”
Addressing current issues
Before the vote, many parents expressed surprise the board was poised to decide on the move before the rest of the realignment was completed. “The PTAs were never asked for feedback on whether to move six, how best to move them, or what the appropriate prerequisites or appropriate timeline would be. We also tried to reach out to middle-school parents, but the district would not approve it,” said Bennett PTA president Jenny Jared.
Veteran consultant Dr. Kevin Baughman in his 2020 report had offered five scenarios, but did not recommend moving the sixth grade first, Jared said.
Baughman’s scenarios included closing the Woodstock and Phoenicia schools, or reorganizing Woodstock and Phoenicia into k-4 or k-5, plus moving the fifth and/or sixth grade to the middle school, allowing the district to close Bennett. Another option was to do nothing.
“He states ‘It’s ill-advised to move sixth grade to the middle school until the two schools are reorganized and structural separation occurs, so that there is significantly less interactions between the youngest and oldest students in the building,’” Jared said.
“Our experience over the past year and a half at the middle school has shown that the middle school is very much part of the high school, with shared hallways that are already overcrowded without the addition of more children,” said Joanna Drescher, a parent of a fifth grader and an eighth grader. “There are also lockers that are in mixed hallways for the middle- and high-school students, and in the last year, there are reports of fights in the hallways witnessed by other children who were frightened.”
Drescher said there were reports of vaping, drug use and fighting in the bathrooms. She complained about a lack of sufficient communication from the middle-school administration about how the current issues at the middle school will be addressed in terms of the fights of the vaping and the drug use.
Parent and Phoenicia PTA president Christina Signore elaborated. “I want to be able to support the district in this overall plan to reconfigure for the better good of the students, especially the initiative to move the sixth grade to the middle school and be a team player,” she said. “However, how can I possibly do that when I have a seventh and ninth grader who have been predisposed to the ever-growing vaping crisis within onto your very own walls, so much so that they don’t even want to use the bathroom throughout the day? Unfortunately, those issues are not simply just isolated to the restrooms, but also easily being used within common areas such as classrooms, locker rooms, hallways.”
Woodstock PTA co-president Kara Colevas felt that voting on an implementation date was putting the cart before the horse. “There is no failure in keeping a six-to-eight middle school as a future district goal, and begin taking the necessary steps to make it a successful implementation instead of locking in the fall of ’23 or ’24,” she said.
Bennett band director Harvey Boyer, who also represents the school for the Onteora Teachers’ Association, was encouraging. He said the move made sense, and that the teachers would support it if it is done with care.
“This change is so multifaceted, that doing it hastily would indeed be detrimental to each and every stakeholder group,” Boyer said. “Let’s roll this out in a way that is thoughtful and not rushed. We need to make time take time to construct a framework that allows us to plan for both the educational adjustments to curriculum and staffing and scheduling, etc.
“Please, in all seriousness, let’s give this more time. What’s the rush? Let’s really be thoughtful about how this is going to impact our district. It’s an amazing district. We deserve that opportunity.”
The district culture
Parent and former school board member Lindsay Shands read a statement from Daphne DeJesus, another parent and former school board member.
“My child with a neurological condition isn’t going to merely rise to the occasion upon entering middle school,” DeJesus’ statement read. “Neither will many of the kids like her who work hard and still struggle. Neither will many of the neurotypical kids even because they are all still adjusting to life in a waning pandemic. The last time I came before this board, as a PTA elementary parent was in 2019, advocating for my daughter that school in that school and its students, I was compelled to present the perspective of special needs and self-contained students. I am compelled once again to ask this. This has to be accounted for.”
A fifth grader offered her perspective on the move.
“Hello, my name is Josephine and I’m a fifth grader at Bennett Elementary. And to start things off, I think that the all the fifth graders have a say if they go to a middle school or not. And 90 percent of my friends don’t want to go because they think that they’re not ready,” she said. “And a couple of sixth graders also think that they can barely handle Bennett. So it’s going to be a lot harder in middle school. And a couple of my friends also afraid of going to the bathroom and seeing people smoke and having the possibility of getting secondhand smoking.”
Josephine said it was too much of a change. She knows some middle-school students who get bullied for their height.
Board president Emily Sherry weighed in. “A lot of it has to do with making sure that we’re managing for children’s emotions, for teacher support, for structure of the actual building itself, and for ensuring that any student, not just potential incoming sixth graders are not having to manage for vaping, fear of the bathroom, fighting in the hallways,” she said. “All of this stuff is not just about moving sixth graders, but it is about the culture of our district.”
Sherry said she didn’t want to hear about a child afraid to go the bathroom, whether in the high school, the middle school, or one of the elementary schools. “So, obviously, there’s a lot of work to be done here. And I’m fully committed to it. And I know that the rest of the trustees are as well.”
McLaren said the district was working out the kinks with vaping sensors installed in the bathrooms, which are showing inaccurate readings. “It is also an issue of having people available to respond immediately and depending on how many students are in the bathroom at a particular time and addressing it in real time. So that’s another issue that needs to be addressed,” she said. Some work will need to be done to minimize the interaction between the youngest and oldest students.
McLaren said hallways will be reconfigured “in terms of classrooms where middle schoolers need to get to, and having hallways that are very separate and dedicated to middle schoolers and trying to reroute traffic so that we don’t have high schoolers and middle schoolers traversing the same hallways where possible.” There will be spaces that will have both high schoolers and middle schoolers, but staff will supervise those areas.
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