6th-Graders No Longer Elementary

‘We had to work hard to ease parents’ fears . . . meet students’ needs’

The Saturday before the 1984 fall semester began, the halls of South Pasadena Junior High were filled with parents watching their future sixth-graders practice working the combinations on their lockers. “The biggest fear the kids had was about their lockers,” said Granville Thurman, principal of the school. “So we handed out hall locker assignments before the start of school so the kids had a chance to try them out.”

As more and more school districts throughout Southern California realign their junior high programs of seventh, eighth and ninth grades to a “middle school” concept of sixth, seventh and eighth grades, experiences like those at South Pasadena are becoming more frequent.

Administrators, teachers, parents and students alike are having to make several adjustments because the transition from cloistered elementary schools to the more worldly secondary campuses is now taking place a year earlier, when a child is 12 years old.

Better Than Expected

At first, it was feared that sixth-graders were not mature enough to handle a secondary school environment. But after several years of experience, many school administrators say they have discovered that grouping sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders together is physically and socially better than the old junior high configuration.

And, they add, it has brought about a period of innovation and experimentation in academic and extracurricular activities that has not been seen on these campuses in decades.

“The junior high program was becoming a watered-down version of high school,” said Manuel Gallegos, superintendent of the Downey Unified School District. “By bringing sixth, seventh and eighth grades together we have been able to make this academic experience a bridge between elementary and high school.”

It was not meant to be this way.

When dwindling school populations in the late 1970s endangered the capability of some Southern California high schools to offer a comprehensive program, school districts throughout the region discovered that the realignment--or reconfiguration, as some districts call it--of grades was an easy way to increase their high school enrollments.

Solution Seemed Simple

Solving the problem seemed simple: prop up high school registration by moving ninth-graders to high school campuses and maintain junior high registration by taking sixth-graders off the playground and placing them on the quad.

Then came the 1982 state Education Reform Act, with its emphasis on a four-year, college preparatory high school program. Placing ninth-graders on high school campuses became even more palatable to local educators because it provided more continuity for students and made it easier for them to fulfill all the Reform Act’s requirements.

About 65% of the 107 school districts in Los Angeles County have turned to the middle school concept. Most shifted to the arrangement after 1974, when enrollments began to decline.

One-third of the junior high schools in the huge Los Angeles Unified School District now have sixth-graders on their campuses and, according to Dan Isaacs, head of the Los Angeles district’s Special Projects Office, the district will continue to look for likely candidates for grade realignment.

“Even when enrollment grows, we won’t go back to a six-three-three configuration because a four-year high school works for a variety of reasons, including improved academic achievement,” Isaacs said.

The Ventura Unified School District changed its four junior highs to middle schools three years ago after the district closed five elementary schools. District Supt. Patrick Rooney said the switch was “primarily for education benefits, but dwindling enrollment allowed us the opportunity to make the change.”

Only Stopgap for Some

For some districts, however, a middle school is only a stopgap measure. In 1978, Orange County’s Newport-Mesa Unified School District created a middle school, but the district’s enrollment continued to fall. Last year, administrators were forced to return sixth-graders to elementary campuses and place seventh- and eighth-graders at Corona del Mar High School.

How to educate youths in the early throes

of adolescence has been an issue that American educators have been grappling with since the end of World War I.

Junior high schools developed because they were seen as a way to break the pattern of students leaving the public school system after graduating from the traditional kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school.

Additionally, said Robert B. Everhart, associate professor of education and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the grouping of young adolescents in a separate school was viewed as a way of meeting their special learning and psychological needs. “The junior high was developed on the premise that those young people were not ready for independence and needed to be harnessed and directed toward socially useful behavior,” Everhart said.

Junior high schools grouping seventh, eighth and ninth grades enjoyed their greatest acceptance in the West and Middle West.

On the East Coast, school districts took a cue from the private prep schools there and developed the middle, or intermediate, school concept of grouping sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders.

“The difference in direction has nothing to do with any lofty educational theories,” said Cynthia Benton, a lecturer at UCLA’s School of Education. “Actually, it has more to do with the ability of these school districts to build new facilities.”

Nevertheless, said Gary Marx, executive director of the American Assn. of School Administrators, Southern California has seen more of its school districts realigned in the last decade than has any other region of the country.

When officials proposed these grade regroupings, they had plenty of ammunition to justify such a change. For one, there was research dating back to the 1900s that indicated that a unique educational system was needed for early adolescents. What is more, recent studies had detailed a sophistication of post-World War II children that made the six-three-three grade grouping outdated.

Still, while many school administrators said they had long known that the grouping of the sixth, seventh and eighth grades was preferable, they conceded that there was no real incentive to change the old alignment until the lack of students in high schools threatened the quality of course offerings.

“Even educators sometime succumb to the theory that if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it,” said Patricia Byer, associate dean of the School of Education at California State University, Los Angeles, who has acted as a consultant to school districts that have changed grade groupings.

Still, many local school superintendents said they thought that realignment would backfire if there was not community support for moving 12-year-olds to junior high school.

“There was an awful lot of anxiety by the part of parents of sixth-graders,” said Curt Rethmeyer, superintendent of the Culver City Unified School District, which adopted the middle school concept last year. “We had to work hard to ease those fears while making sure we met the students’ needs.

“One point we had to get across was that the big kids would be gone. In other words, the ninth- graders, who are physically and socially more advanced than sixth-graders, would be at the high school,” Rethmeyer added. Culver City, like other districts that made the change, established a group of parents, teachers and administrators to study middle schools. These research teams made recommendations on instruction and curriculum changes, and often acted as a go-between for the school district when it needed to offer assurances to parents puzzled by the sudden change in grade grouping.

Counselors Added

Some of the changes the realigned schools have initiated include the addition of counselors for sixth-graders who may have academic or social problems while making the transition to a secondary school environment. Many of these realigned schools have also revamped sixth-grade curriculum so that students still receive basic elementary instruction while getting the opportunity to explore secondary school courses.

However, many older students and their parents have not been pleased with some changes that have come about from realignment.

Sports--especially boys’ interscholastic programs--have been hurt, with many districts doing away with interschool competition on the junior high level. Other districts limit competitive team participation to eighth-graders.

Extracurricular activities such as dances, student council, drill teams and after-school programs have been altered in consideration of the younger students. And some junior high school principals complain that the addition of sixth-graders, together with new academic requirements mandated by the state, limit the opportunity for many students to take electives such as art, music, drama, journalism and shop.

“The texture has been taken out of the junior high program,” one disgruntled administrator said.

Credentials a Problem

There have also been problems with teachers having the proper credentials to work with a combined elementary-secondary student population. Most junior high school teachers have secondary teaching credentials that indicate an area of specialization. Elementary teachers, on the other hand, often have general education credentials that preclude their teaching secondary students.

When districts change to the middle school concept, many principals find that they have to scramble to make sure that their teachers have proper credentials. In some cases, this means getting emergency elementary credentials so that junior high school teachers can teach sixth-graders and special waivers for elementary teachers so that they can teach secondary students.

The districts also usually also redesigned the sixth-grade curriculum so that younger students have the continuity of having one teacher for most of the day while still blending in with the older students who change classrooms every hour.

The plan most districts adopt groups English, reading and social studies or mathematics, health and science together into two- or three-hour classes. These classes are taught by a single teacher. For the remaining three periods of the day, sixth-graders change classes right along with the older students.

“With this kind of curriculum setup we can continue to emphasize basic skill acquisition while giving the students their first opportunity to explore specialized fields,” said Gallegos of the Downey district.

Give Extra Attention

“This gives us the opportunity to make sure students who need extra attention in reading or in math get that extra attention while students who are ready for advanced work can move ahead more rapidly,” he said.

But not everyone agrees. Last year, a group of San Fernando Valley sixth-graders rebelled at being placed in one classroom for three hours while seventh- and eighth-graders were allowed to change rooms.

“They wanted to change classes just like the big kids, so we had to do some fast shuffling to make those classes only two hours long the following semester,” one administrator recalled.

So far, most superintendents call the shift to the middle school concept an unqualified success in which sixth-graders have been given the best of the elementary and junior high program. And, the superintendents point out, very few of the parental fears about sending young children to secondary schools ever came true.