Brief by Central Staff
Education – May 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
It figures. Just a few years after the Salida school district built a new middle school to serve grades 5-8, we encounter this headline: “Middle School Goes Out of Fashion.”
It was in the April 6 edition of the Wall Street Journal, and the article reported that “a growing body of evidence is showing that preteen students do better when they can remain in their familiar elementary schools for longer – with better grades and fewer disciplinary problems than their middle-school peers. As a result, many school systems are starting to do away with middle schools and increase the number of elementary schools that continue through the eighth grade.”
Before opening the middle school, Salida ran grades K-6 at Longfellow Elementary (except that the K and 6 were at the old St. Joseph’s Parochial School building), and grades 7-8 at Kesner Junior High, one wing of the 9-12 high school building. Now Longfellow is K-4, the middle school is 5-8, and the high school remains 9-12.
But it might be time to rethink that arrangement, since a Milwaukee study that compared K-8 students to students who moved from elementary to middle schools found that “those who switched had more negative attitudes toward school and lower grades. And girls in particular didn’t recover in middle adolescence (grades nine and 10) when it came to self-esteem and participation in extracurricular activities.”
