By Patrick Adrian
EAGLE TIMES STAFF
CLAREMONT — The Claremont School District hopes through public forums and online surveys to solicit community feedback about the district’s bold plan to restructure Claremont’s three elementary schools from overlapping K-5 programs to a single, interconnected system.
About 20 participants — eight in person and 12 on Zoom — joined a public forum at Stevens High School on Monday, where Superintendent Michael Tempesta discussed the district’s proposed elementary restructuring plan.
The proposal, if adopted, would replace having three overlapping neighborhood-based elementary schools by assigning each school to serve different grade levels. Maple Avenue will house all students in pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and first grade; Disnard will serve students in second and third grade; and Bluff will serve students in the fourth and fifth grade.
Reorganizing the schools based on grade-level would yield numerous benefits, particularly by creating more stability and district control of class sizes from year to year, Tempesta said.
Having overlapping schools can be inefficient and create inequitable educational experiences, Tempesta noted. During the 2020-2021 school year, Maple Avenue had 49 fourth-graders but only two fourth grade classrooms, resulting in 25 children per class. Bluff, which only had 26 fourth-graders, had two classrooms serving 13 students per class.
Grade-based schools would enable more evenly-distributed class sizes, cultivate stronger student cohorts, and open opportunities for content-based learning and accelerated or specialized learning programs by pairing teachers to their areas of strength and the needs of students.
But obtaining the community’s buy-in will likely be critical, Tempesta acknowledged.
“The whole idea of losing that neighborhood school [may be difficult for people],” Tempesta said, sharing an example. “There’s a community impact when generations of neighbors went to that one school.”
Other parents, back in 2019 when the restructuring proposal was first publicly shared, conveyed logistical concerns about trying to pick up their children from two or three different schools at dismissal. Tempesta said that transportation logistics, including the cost and feasibility to reconfigure bus routes, remains a major question to study.
In effort to re-engage the community’s attention — as the proposal was not publicly discussed in 2020 due to the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic — the district scheduled this forum, as well as a second forum on Monday, Oct. 25, to inform the public and gather input.
On Friday the district also sent families a link to an online survey. The survey consists of seven statements regarding various benefits of the proposed restructuring and asks the survey taker to rank the importance of each benefit.
But some residents on Monday said the survey was not well-designed to collect meaningful data.
Jessica Christian, a Claremont parent, said the survey structure does not allow the taker to express support or concerns about the restructuring plan.
“While I found the questions to be beautifully written, I also felt there was no other way to [realistically] answer them,” Christian said.
For example, Christian said, almost every parent, if asked about the importance of smaller class sizes or increasing enrichment opportunities, will probably answer “Extremely Important” or “Important.” However, the survey questions do not indicate how restructuring the schools is necessary to achieve those goals, so how a parent responds does not reflect an opinion regarding the restructuring plan.
Jean Allen, a Claremont educator and parent, noted the survey’s lack of identifying questions to determine the survey-taker’s relationship to the schools. Allen also felt the survey’s scope should extend to the entire Claremont community, who also consider themselves stakeholders in the education system.
Tempesta agreed that this survey was lacking in depth and detail. Due to time constraints, the district wanted to launch the survey primarily to get the community’s attention and hopefully increase attendance to Monday’s forum.
“We really put it together to get something out and hopefully springboard participation tonight, knowing how challenging it can be this time of year [to get people out],” Tempesta said. “I do agree that it would be better to have vetted [the survey] with our administrative team, though our administrative team was also busy ramping up for this school year.”
Tempesta said the district will likely send out a second, more developed survey that will be more driven for effective data gathering.
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