Educators from New York City to Pittsburgh to Sacramento are praising combination middle-high schools as a way of preventing students from dropping out.
Now, Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso wants to bring this 6-12 model, an emerging trend across the nation, to Charm City.
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Alonso, who is pushing to open 24 combination schools, says the reconfiguration gives teachers the time to re-engage troubled students sooner rather than waiting until freshman year. It also eliminates the tough transition between middle and high school, supporters say.
Research shows that students start slipping off the path toward high school graduation as early as sixth grade with poor attendance, course failures and behavioral problems that grow worse with time.
“Instead of just four years to get students ready for graduation, these schools have another three,” said Doug MacIver, principal research scientist at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at The Johns Hopkins University.
“Teachers can get to know the students and their families. This is a very promising direction for urban districts, where lots of students are living in poverty.”
In addition, he said, this grouping allows talented middle schoolers to take high school courses and older students to mentor younger ones.
Some parents, however, express reservations about sending their sixth-graders to a school also housing juniors and seniors.
Nikkole Smith, a mother of two boys, one in eighth grade and another in sixth, said she would worry about older teenagers negatively influencing her youngest son, Dominick.
“He?s 13 so he is very impressionable at this age. He could go off and follow the 16-year-olds,” she said.
“Being with kids that are much older wouldn?t allow him to concentrate on his school work.”
Thomas Ajibola, an assistant principal of Frederick Douglass Academy, a 6-12 school in New York City ? Alonso?s previous school system ? heard similar parent grumblings, especially when the school added sixth grade five years ago.
But at Frederick Douglass, where sixth-grade classrooms are on a separate floor, the advantages outweigh safety concerns, he said.
“The little ones like to be with the older children,” he said.
“They have something to aspire to because high school is not just something they hear about.”
