MEET THE BAUMANN SCHOOL BUS DRIVERS
SCHOOLS
053003 Katonah-Lewisboro School District has opportunity to resolve middle school dilemma
To the Editor:
Last week at the League of Women Voters candidate night, I spoke to one mother about the overcrowding at John Jay Middle School and heard another, Karen Conti, talk about the drug and alcohol problem in our secondary schools.
The first mother said if she had the money she would take her child out of the middle school. It's just too crowded. Of course that has been Principal Doug Both's mantra for all these years. Middle schools, according to the Princeton Plan, should not be any larger then 500 or 600 students. Yet the middle school principal has persuaded us to build a school for 1,200 students starting this fall - doubling the recommended size.
I would suggest we do something different before it's too late. Let's move the sixth graders back to the elementary schools and reduce the size of the present middle school - to a more manageable 600 or 700 seventh and eighth graders.
At each elementary school let's build four classrooms and two reading/special-ed rooms with the money we are about to waste on the middle school (there is more than enough money in the middle school budget to accomplish this change, and employing the approach used at Meadow Pond last year, the projects could be finished twice as fast).
One of the classrooms should be a science lab and the four teachers (math, science, English, and social studies) for each sixth-grade section should be trained in the middle school model of team teaching. This would give sixth graders a transitional year into this model without the disadvantage of being lost in a larger, overcrowded school.
Now the second issue - drugs and alcohol.
Given that we know there is a problem, why are we pushing our.younger children into the secondary level and all its peer temptations to "try it"? Why are we creating a larger school
for them to get lost in? I think Karen Conti is accurate in her concerns about drug and alcohol at the secondary schools. The board of education should be taking a hard look at this issue, which only seems to be discussed in whispering fears by parents on the sidelines of sports gatherings.
A bigger, more impressive middle school might be a solution to congested hallways. But will it help sixth graders avoid the pressure of older peers in school or on the buses? Would it not be better to keep them in the smaller, more intimate surroundsof the elementary schools for another' year? There is no law that says sixth graders have to be with seventh and eighth graders. They're not even allowed to participate in the afterschool modified sports programs.
Why are we in such a hurry to test our children's maturity by pushing them into a larger school - to test their moral mettle against the pressures of older peers to sample the temptations and pressures of the adolescent world?