Some elementary schools end in fifth grade, some in eighth. It matters more than you may think

Megan Sullivan had hoped that her two daughters could attend the same school for a few years before her older daughter headed to high school. This past year the girls attended kindergarten and fifth grade at Indianapolis Public Schools Center For Inquiry School 84, which for years has been a K-8 school.

Starting this year, however, the girls' school and the other IPS K-8 schools will move to a K-5 model. This means Mabel Shrom will attend sixth grade at Harshman Middle School miles away from her northside home while her sister Romy Shrom will continue to be able to walk to school at CFI 84.

Like many other IPS parents whose kids no longer have the option of attending a K-8 school, Sullivan has doubts about the new system. She said she would have preferred for her two girls to be at the same school until Mabel started high school.

“Now dividing any energy that I have between two school communities is definitely more taxing,” Sullivan told IndyStar.

The K-8 model that IPS has embraced until now set the district apart from many others that have long divided students into elementary, middle or intermediate, and high school. Central Indiana school districts, however, take a wide variety of approaches to splitting up their grades.

Westfield Washington has elementary schools that begin with pre-kindergarten through fourth grade, then switch to a different school for fifth and sixth and a third school for seventh and eighth and then high school. In Franklin Township , students start in kindergarten through third grade schools, then move to an intermediate fourth- through sixth-grade building and a junior high school for seventh and eighth grades. Other districts separate out the youngest high schoolers in their own building or have designated kindergarten academies.

IPS is not the only district to try something different this year. Beech Grove Schools will also tweak its grade configurations, putting second through fourth graders in one building and two grades in each of the three other buildings it uses for elementary and middle school students.

Educational experts say there's no one right way to split up grades but that each school district must reach its own conclusion on what works best. Factors like demographics, the size of the student population, and the best way to support students in transitional grades like kindergarten, 6 ^th and 9 ^th grade can all play a role in districts' decisions of how to divvy up the grades, they say.

There's no one clear answer, either, for what type of schools work best for students. While some studies have found that stand-alone middle schools lead to lower academic achievement, other experts dispute those findings. In IPS, one of the factors behind the move to middle schools is creating a more equitable sixth through eighth grade experience with extracurriculars and athletics throughout the district.

Stilll, the Sullivan-Shrom family is bracing for what this year will bring. Sullivan has been undergoing cancer treatment and appreciated having her daughters at the same school, where they could sometimes walk to school together. Now that they will attend separate schools, Sullivan will have to figure out transportation for both of them and her older daughter will have to adjust to a new school, a challenge the family had thought she would not face until high school.

And, Sullivan said, she has no idea what the future will bring for her daughters' schooling.

"I joke the only constant in IPS is change," she said.

Do middle schools affect academic achievement?

Some research suggests that the fewer transitions students make, the better their academic outcomes.

A 2012 study on schools across Florida showed that students in stand-alone middle schools suffered a drop in academic achievement compared to students who stayed in a K-8 setting. In addition, students who attended middle schools had more absences in high school and were more likely to drop out of high school.

However, Martin West, a professor of education at Harvard University and co-author of the study, said his study did not conclude that there is one best grade configuration for all school districts across the country. Instead, he said, he believes the best approach depends on what fits a district’s specific needs, keeping in mind that school transitions can be difficult.

“I think that school districts that are weighing these decisions should be aware that school transitions appear to be challenging for students in early adolescence and that stand-alone middle schools appear to be challenging to get right from an academic perspective,” West told IndyStar.

Even in the absence of expert agreement that shows K-8 schools lead to better student outcomes, some IPS parents said the welcoming and family-like atmosphere that K-8 schools provide drew them into the district.

Jonelle Chalmers told IndyStar that she chose to enroll her daughter Matilda in CFI School 27 because she liked how the K-8 structure led older students to become leaders and role models for the younger students.

The fact the older grades at CFI 27 lacked many of the extracurriculars other middle schools offer did not dissuade her from choosing 27. Chalmers said she believed that the social-emotional learning that Matilda would gain from the K-8 environment was worth the sacrifice.

“We want to make smart kids but we also want to make good kids who grow up to be good people, and I think navigating that in the (K-8) environment is just great for all of them,” Chalmers said.

Middle schools can offer expanded opportunities

Other education experts like John Somers, an associate professor of teacher education at the University of Indianapolis, said he finds the research on what grade configurations produce the best student outcomes inconclusive. Transitions have to happen at some point and when they do, schools just need to be prepared to best support students, he said.

Factors other than a school's grade configuration are more likely to impact students' learning, he said.

“At the end of the day, what really matters is the highly effectiveness of your teachers, your curriculum, the learning environment, parent engagement and how do these schools reflect community values and reflect student needs,” Somers told IndyStar.

IPS officials say that the move to stand-alone middle schools will provide more equitable access to school programs and extracurriculars to all students in the district, one of the goals of the Rebuilding Stronger plan. Many of the district's K-8 schools had limited athletic facilities or lacked algebra or band teachers.

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Harshman Middle School on the east side, which formerly offered only seventh and eighth grade, will become a sixth- through eighth-grade school this school year. The school has offered middle school education for decades, but this year will add a high-ability and dual language program.

Harshman parent Debbie Pidgeon said she hopes the extra grade will increase opportunities at the school. Pidgeon's oldest daughter is a rising eighth grader, who attended Theodore Potter School 74, a K-6 school, her whole life before transitioning last year to Harshman along with many of her Potter classmates for seventh grade.

Her daughter's seventh grade class was small last year as Harshman prepares for an influx of students this year, Pidgeon said. She's looking forward to having more classmates.

“They need more kids in their class,” Pidgeon said. “The quantity of children needs to expand because these kids have been together for so long, and they need to start making adjustments like adding more people in and learning what it’s like to meet new people."

Why do school districts choose certain grade configurations?

IPS joins many other local districts that have long divided grades into elementary, middle and high schools, with some variations on when elementary school ends.

Wayne Township superintendent Jeff Butts, who previously was a principal at a middle school for 10 years, said he thinks there are many benefits from having a stand-alone middle school. Putting young teens together, he said, creates a better environment to help students develop during that early adolescent period when students are undergoing puberty changes and taking more difficult classes.

“When they’re in those K-8 buildings, they’re still going to see kindergarteners walking through the hall, still going to see them walking in straight lines, and they’re still going to have a lot of those elementary practices around them,” Butts told IndyStar. “It doesn't truly give the adolescent the opportunity to separate themselves and to go through that kind of young adulthood transition."

Around 20 years ago Wayne Township officials noticed that ninth graders struggled to move on from the middle school mindset when they entered high school. So in 2005 the district opened seventh- to eighth-grade schools as well as a ninth-grade center that focused on preparing ninth graders to graduate high school on time.

Other districts like Perry Township have moved to some buildings dedicated to a single-grade. Perry has sixth grade and kindergarten academies to either help students transition into school for the first time or away from elementary school.

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Perry Township opened its four kindergarten academies around eight years ago in response to increasingly crowded elementary schools and to avoid building two new elementary schools.

Nicole Jewell, principal at Perry's Douglas MacArthur Kindergarten Academy, said the single-grade academy with about 275 students has helped teachers zero in on what exactly the youngest students need to succeed.

The state’s focus on improving early literacy scores has only heightened the need for kindergarten academies, which can focus on early preparation, Jewell said. Recently passed laws that could hold back more third graders if they do not pass the IREAD exam raise the stakes even higher.

Perry's kindergarten academies do a lot of work to prepare students to read proficiently earlier in life and prepare teachers on how to teach early literacy skills, Jewell said.

“It allowed us to be so focused on intentional development for our teachers and our support staff so that everyone works to best support these kids,” Jewell said.

Beech Grove Schools: A unique case study

The changes to the state's early literacy standards have contributed to another district's decision to change its grade configuration. Previously Beech Grove used one building for preK-1, one for second and third grade, a third for fourth through sixth grade and a seventh and eighth-grade middle school.

This year the district has placed second through fourth grade together in one building and will open a new Hornet Park Early Childhood Center to serve pre-kindergarten students.

Beech Grove superintendent Laura Hammack said that the district had been considering changing their grade layouts but the new literacy laws pushed them to make this change. The new laws include not only holding back third graders who don't pass IREAD but also requiring schools to teach "science of reading"-backed curriculums .

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Both academic and social-emotional concerns prompted the switch, Hammack said. On the academic side, district officials hope the new configuration will help ease any retention that may need to happen with struggling readers.

“We want to make sure that our students who may be retained do still have access to those typical aged peers and that is what's showing in retention data, that students can really disconnect when they don't feel like they're with their people,” Hammack told IndyStar.

In addition, separating fourth graders from the older students may prevent the younger ones from developing the negative behaviors that start showing up in the fifth through eighth grades.

But dividing all the grades this many ways may be something only a district as small as Beech Grove, which has a total student enrollment of around 2,800, can make happen. Even with all the splitting of grades, every student in Beech Grove will go through every building with the same group of classmates, which is only possible thanks to the district's unique makeup, Hammack said.

Beech Grove used to have multiple kindergarten through sixth grade school buildings, but in the early 1990’s the district divided the grades into a similar layout to what they have today.

Beyond the neighborhood school

With the IPS change, the only K-8 schools remaining in the central Indiana area will be private schools, independent charter schools or innovation charter schools.

School board commissioner Will Pritchard, whose own children had to leave CFI 2 for seventh and eighth grade this year, said he would not be surprised if some families now choose one of these other options, looking for a school their child can attend for nine years.

That choice would be understandable, he said, since one of the main complaints families have with large urban school districts is all the changes their students undergo.

"There is a changing curriculum, there's a change in teachers, there's a change in grade configurations," Pritchard said. "One of the complaints parents have is there's just general instability."

But some IPS parents are embracing this change.

IPS's move to middle schools erases most of the district’s boundary lines it had for its K-8 schools. The plan creates four enrollment zones for lower-grade schools with each zone having the same menu of schools from which to choose. At the middle school level, families can choose to attend a school within their zone or anywhere else in the district.

Windi Hornsby has said her two children enjoyed the family-like atmosphere at Theodore Potter School 74. Now her rising seventh grader looks forward to meeting students from beyond the neighborhood while she continues to participate in a dual-language Spanish program, Hornsby said. Mother and daughter have few qualms about losing the close-knit school environment of School 74.

“I’m not worried about it,” Hornsby told IndyStar. “I think that kind of feeling of community will continue on wherever you go to middle school."

Contact IndyStar reporter Caroline Beck at 317-618-5807 or CBeck@gannett.com . Follow her on Twitter (X): @CarolineB_Indy .

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Some elementary schools end in fifth grade, some in eighth. It matters more than you may think