Parents with kids in Templeton Elementary’s multi-age program are unhappy with changes they say were made without the school corporation notifying them.
The Monroe County Community School Corporation’s multi-age program has kids from various grade levels learning and collaborating in the same classroom.
At the corporation’s July board meeting, various community members spoke about the need to preserve the multi-age program at Templeton, saying it had “lapsed” in the last year. It was the first time that concerns on the program came up at a board meeting in at least the last year.
WFIU/WTIU News spoke with various parents who said the corporation didn’t notify them that they changed the program until the end of the school year; they heard about the changes from their kids first.
Last year, parents said shared lunch and recess went away, as well as a weekly enrichment program called “Invitations,” where kids would learn about different topics. There were also no longer shared morning meetings with all the students in grades K-6, and they weren’t learning the same subjects at the same time of day as had been in the past. The classes were more divided, with fewer opportunities for collaboration among all the grade levels.
“We only found out because children were coming home and telling us and being really upset about all that they had lost from one academic year to the next,” said Frank Brown Cloud, who had two kids in the program. “…They [my kids] were much sadder to be back at school than they had been in previous years.”
Julie Duhon had three kids in the program. She was especially upset that the Invitations program went away; she said it helped her kids explore common interests with students of other ages.
“School is really an artificial environment where we define our peers as the people who are the same age as us, right?” she said. “But the rest of our lives, we understand that our peers are usually not people who are the same age as us. They're the people who have similar interests, who are involved in similar activities, right? And so, this Invitations program allowed us to dismantle the notion that your peers have to be the people who are the same age as you, but instead they can be people who have a common interest with you.”
Parents didn’t hear from the corporation until May, when Templeton’s principal, Joshua Livingston, and Lily Albright, Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment at the time, held a meeting with parents to hear their concerns about the changes. It’s unclear why the changes were made in the first place; parents said they were told it was due to curriculum changes.
At the last board meeting, Board President Erin Cooperman told WFIU/WTIU News that MCCSC has not announced any changes to the program and will review public comments on the matter. MCCSC did not respond to an additional request for an interview on the subject.
Parents spoke about how their kids have benefitted from being in the program and were concerned it could be further cut. Cloud said his children have been able to learn from others of different ages and backgrounds in the classroom and work at their own pace.
“My younger child was working with somebody older, and they just happened to be working on the same set of skills for reading and writing at that time, and the two of them working together, it seemed like it was going to be much less stigmatizing for the older child not to have to leave the classroom and go to an intervention session,” he said. “He was able to continue working and feeling like he was actually helping someone else while doing that material, as opposed to being put in a remedial situation, and feeling like he was accomplishing less in school than others.”
Cloud said he thinks working with the same teacher throughout elementary school instead of being assigned to a new teacher every year is an especially important part of the program that helps kids.
“They are going to see the same teacher next year … you have these multi-year commitments between the teacher and the student that can be really good for emotional development,” he said, “and allow it so teachers stay engaged and stay motivated to help these students and help make sure that any of these behavioral issues actually get corrected and addressed instead of just passing people along to be dealt with by someone else.”
A few weeks into the new school year, Duhon, along with multi-age parent Michael Valliant, said they’ve seen remnants of the program coming back; their kids have been able to collaborate more with different-aged students. But they still think more needs to be done.
Valliant, Cloud and Duhon think the corporation should more widely publicize the program, which they think would help recruit and retain students. Cloud said if he hadn’t had a spouse working in the corporation, he might not have known about the program. Duhon also said the program felt “exclusionary;” she learned about it from other parents, not the corporation.
“The fact that MCCSC isn't really touting this as a progressive educational model in the face of charter schools and other kinds of private school opportunities, is beyond me when public education is under the kind of attack that it is,” Valliant said. “We made deliberate choices every year to send our son to Templeton; we had opportunities to send him to Montessori. We had opportunities to send him to the Project School.”
