By Patrick Adrian
EAGLE TIMES STAFF
CLAREMONT — Claremont School Board members cited a lack of compelling evidence as the driving reason for halting consideration of the district’s elementary school restructuring proposal.
The Claremont School District announced on Friday that it is suspending its study of a major elementary restructuring plan — which sought to interconnect Claremont’s three neighborhood elementary schools into a single program for all K-5 students — after meeting with the school board on Thursday evening.
Most board members, in interviews with the Eagle Times, said they still see potential benefits from a restructuring, including opportunities to improve the district’s fiscal and operating efficiency. However, while some opinions varied, the board members all agreed that the district’s data and evidence is not sufficient yet to justify the need of such a major overhaul or to satisfy the many public concerns about the potential impacts.
“I felt that we were rushing,” said board member Rob Lovett. “Unless we could all of the board and the public behind it, we would be ice skating uphill.”
Entering Thursday’s meeting, Lovett said he was still deliberating the proposal. Lovett said he still wanted assurance that this restructuring would not result in social-emotional repercussions for students, would be the best course “educationally,” and that it would maximize the district’s resources and finances through efficient utilization.
Board members similarly agreed that the data presented to them fell short of evidence that the restructuring would yield the anticipated district-wide academic growth.
“I didn’t get the evidence to convince me this approach was really necessary,” said board Chair Frank Sprague.
Board member Joshua Lambert said the district presented a variety of student testing data at the middle and high school levels to emphasize the need for major structural change in the district. Lambert, a paraprofessional who is working toward earning his New Hampshire teaching license, said he still did not find the data “substantial enough” to warrant such an overhaul.
“Yes, kids in Claremont are behind,” Lambert said. “But the data shown is similar to other school districts in our region.”
Board members said they wish now to concentrate efforts behind creating a more uniform elementary school curriculum across the district, to address a long-running problem in the district’s three overlapping schools.
Board members praised new Assistant Superintendent Mary Ellen Janeiro, who presented her plan to reform the district’s curriculum to address academic gaps and inconsistencies.
“I want to lock down the curriculum before trying anything more drastic,” Lambert said.
But board Vice-chair Heather Whitney, still a strong advocate of restructuring, said that the curriculum differences are only one problem in the overlapping schools.
While the three schools are supposed to follow an identical curriculum already, uniformity can be difficult when schools operate independently from one another. Each school has its own administration and faculty, which frequently change in a district with a historically high turnover rate. The schools also have starkly different neighborhood zones, resulting in disproportionate percentages of students living in poverty or with special needs and uneven enrollment sizes.
The inequities between the schools produce inconsistencies in the district’s overall academic data, according to Whitney, while the many variables make it difficult to isolate the causes.
If students were assigned to buildings by their grade cohort rather than their home address, as the restructuring plan aimed to do, “there would be nowhere to hide the inconsistencies,” Whitney said.
“If there was a slip in one school, you would be able to know where the failure is occurring,” said Whitney.
For Whitney, the evidence to support restructuring is there, but it has not been incorporated into a clear and compelling rationale to convince the public.
“I personally still think that restructuring is the right way to go,” Whitney said. “But I do not think we can clearly message it yet.”
Whitney said she has found ample evidence through studies of similar restructurings of the feasibility, as well as the fiscal and academic benefits. But the board and community need to be behind the proposal as well.
“I am not going to support it if it doesn’t have their support,” Whitney said. “But I am going to double down my efforts to [advocate for it.].”
Board members said they would still like to address issues of inequity such as uneven class sizes. For example, last school year Maple Avenue Elementary had 49 fourth-graders, resulting in 25 fourth-graders per classroom, while Bluff elementary, which only had 26 fourth-graders, had only 13 fourth-graders per classroom. had fourth grade classrooms with 25 children per classroom.
Sprague said he suggested the district do a strategic remapping of its school zones based on demographic data, to redistribute students more equitably.
“When they initially drew up those maps they must have been equitable then,” Sprague said, noting that the maps should stay current with the changing neighborhood demographics.
Board member Michael Petrin agreed that remapping is “something to look at.”
“I know that people love their community schools,” Petrin said. “But if the board feels it’s the best decision for the kids, that is what we need to do.”
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