Middle school choices among parents' chief concerns

Timothy Lewis had a good experience at Howard Middle School in Macon, but he knows the middle school years can bring uncertainty for some families.

“That’s the area I think just growing up in Macon, that’s when we lose a lot of families to private schools and to charter schools,” the recent Mercer University graduate said.

But Lewis has more than his feelings about middle school to fall back on. He spent last fall researching ways to keep parents involved in the public school system.

Along the way, he found an interesting statistic.

“I think there’s a 14 percent drop in enrollment between fifth and sixth grade in Bibb County schools,” Lewis said.

The enrollment drop between fifth and sixth isn't new, of course. For at least 20 years, Bibb County schools have consistently seen an average drop in enrollment of about 110 students between those grades, according to enrollment numbers from the Georgia Department of Education.

Conversely, there is a consistent gain of 400 to 600 students between eighth and ninth grades. That means while some families leave the system as children enter middle school, more families come back into the public schools for high school.

“What I've been told is that middle school is when parents see a larger school with a larger, more complex learning environment, and they still long for that elementary environment,” said Bibb County school Superintendent Curtis Jones. “So they either decide they will homeschool students, or … they may decide to send them to a private school.”

Jones said he hears that students come back for high school because of extracurricular offerings and a chance to compete in athletics with the Georgia High School Association.

“I think in some cases they thought middle schools were not performing as well as elementary or high schools,” Jones said. “I'll be honest — that's just not in Bibb, that's across the state as well. They came back for high school experiences."

There are some reasons for those concerns.

“(Middle school) is the time when we start to see a lot of the achievement gap widening, and that's when we can start predicting high school dropout rates because of students' experiences in middle school,” said Lewis, who is working on a master’s degree in higher education at the University of South Carolina.

This isn’t a Bibb County school issue but one that schools see nationally.

Last fall during his senior year at Mercer University, Lewis researched the problem, interviewed 20 local stakeholders and landed on a possible solution: having some schools house kindergarten through eighth graders. Lewis said studies done in Florida, New York City and Texas showed that students performed better in K-8 schools than in traditional K-5 and then 6-8 models.

He explained the difference this way. “You take the student out of a fifth-grade elementary school where it's very family-like, it's small. They've grown up there. They know the teachers, they know the principal, the families know the school, you know your classmates,” Lewis said.

The middle school is often larger and a different environment from the familiarity of elementary school, he said.

“You don't feel known, you don't feel in some ways safe,” Lewis said. “It's no wonder the academic achievement begins to fall because you take them out of an environment where they're known and where they're cared for into a larger environment where it's much easier to get lost.”

That’s Lewis’ best guess at any rate. He said there is a need for a national study focused on this cohort and its advantages. At one time, Bibb schools followed a kindergarten through sixth-grade model, but shifted away from it in the early 2000s because of state funding formulas.

Funding plays a role

Ron Collier, the chief financial officer for the Bibb schools, said schools could earn one teacher for every 20 students with the middle school model.

“You had middle grades (7-8) and you have middle school (6-8) and … the state was moving everybody toward that, so we eventually got there,” Collier said. “It appeared we could get more funding through the 6-8 format.”

The middle school model of grades 6 to 8 is by far the most popular in Georgia, with 433 schools using that grouping, according to the Georgia Department of Education. Only 30 schools follow a K-8 model, and all but three of those are charter schools.

“A lot of people will tell you that whenever you transition from one school to another, that's when you get into trouble — from fifth to sixth and eighth to ninth,” Jones said. “When you have a K-8, you eliminated one of those. That's what they're looking for, and their belief is that you've created a climate and culture at the school where the students are more comfortable with.”

Jones said the K-8 model isn’t something the Bibb school system is considering, as it would create special challenges with the large age range in one school. Older and younger students would need better separation, principals would need to be prepared for both age groups, and middle school students could see athletic opportunities limited at a smaller school, he said.

Instead, Bibb County schools are using a range of supports to ease the move to middle school.

“We have to show we have a better transition from elementary to middle,” Jones said. “We have to be able to show that middle school academics will continue to improve.”

Bibb County is focusing on continuity of programs among all of the schools, such as the Leader in Me and Positive Behavioral Interventions & Support. They’ve also moved elementary school principals to a feeder middle school to provide a familiar face for new sixth-graders to look up to.

The school system also is focused on six to 12 complexes that put middle and high schools in close proximity. That allows principals to work together and lets students get familiar with staff and the rules and routines of campus, said Stephanie Hartley, the system's spokesperson.

"We're trying to eliminate that eight-nine transition by having those combined campuses,” Jones said. “We're not there yet with that. In some cases, if there is concern about their child attending a larger school, that larger school is really going to be high school, and we'll see what we can do to address that.

"While we do see the numbers come back, we don't get them all back."

This story was originally published December 22, 2017 at 5:43 PM with the headline "Middle school choices among parents' chief concerns."