Rebecca Paige graduated from South Royalton School in 2014, with a class size of 35. Now that she’s just wrapped up her junior year at the University of Vermont, she’s grateful for the opportunities her education at South Royalton afforded her, including low teacher-student ratios and access to Advanced Placement courses.
But she also acknowledged that the small size of her high school made it harder to receive a well-rounded education, simply because there weren’t enough students to justify a more diverse curriculum.
“I definitely feel like whenever there is a choice, it is usually the arts and languages that get placed on the wayside, and those classes are just as important to rounding out a student’s education,” Paige wrote in a recent email. She said that a larger student body would mean “more class availability, which means students (would) get to experience a variety of classes and (could) tailor them to their interests.”
The proposed Royalton-Bethel-Rochester school district merger under Act 46, the state’s school consolidation law, would increase the number and variety of classes available to high school students like Paige by establishing a single location in South Royalton. It would also create a middle school for students in grades six through eight in Bethel, which supporters of the merger say would help teachers meet the unique needs of middle schoolers better than housing them alongside much younger and older students. And the merger would create a Center for Experiential and Environmental Learning in Rochester.
The committee that developed the proposal settled on a plan that would bring together three small high schools. South Royalton School has around 113 students in grades 9 to12, Whitcomb Junior-Senior High in Bethel has 75 and Rochester 33. In the middle school grades, 6 to 8, each district has 81, 49 and 26 students, respectively, according to state enrollment data.
Royalton voters, who turned down the measure 460-203 on April 11, will revote on June 13, per the request of Royalton petitioners.
“When something goes down like this, you can sit around and blame somebody or you can look at yourself and say, ‘What could I have done better than I did? What was it that I could have said or done that I didn’t say or do?’ ” said Bruce Labs, superintendent of the White River Valley Supervisory Union. “I think the conversation just kind of got derailed from what the merger would offer the kids, which is essentially just more opportunities to learn, and learn in different kinds of ways.”
Core Flexibility
Under the Act 46 study committee’s proposal for the merger, high school students from all three towns would have access to a larger and more flexible curriculum at the White River Valley Union High School than their current schools offer. The study committee drew up a proposal of 79 courses, 17 of which would be offered at multiple times, adding up to a total of 115 class sections. These repeated sections would mainly include the core classes: English; algebra I and II; U.S. and world history; foreign language; fitness; and a host of science classes.
Providing multiple time slots for these courses would, theoretically, free students up to explore more specialized electives in which they have an active interest, and which may not be available at their current schools due to small class sizes, Labs said. The possible new course schedule, as drawn up by the study committee, included courses such as economics, current events, jazz band, botany, art history, geology and poetry.
Paige said she did not feel limited by small class sizes at the South Royalton School, but she said she got lucky.
“Fortunately, there were enough (students) in my class that wanted to take AP classes and higher-level foreign language classes that they were available to us,” she wrote. But “there were times … that they weren’t able to offer certain classes because only a couple people wanted to take the class, which was unfortunate.”
Cora Honigford, who graduated from South Royalton School last year, believes that offering multiple time slots for core classes might be the most important factor for students. She often had to decide between two equally desirable but conflicting classes, like calculus and French, and felt shortchanged by having to choose.
“It got frustrating,” she said. “I was interested in things. I wanted to learn.”
Honigford is the daughter of Geo Honigford, a Royalton School Board member who sat on the Act 46 study committee.
For current Royalton high schoolers, the merger would represent a 64 percent increase from the 56 courses and 70 sections the school currently offers, and would include three new Advanced Placement courses, six new arts courses and 13 new math and science courses.
Bethel and Rochester high schoolers do not currently have access to any AP courses. The merged high school would offer 48 more courses than Bethel’s Whitcomb High School, 140 percent more than the 32 courses currently offered. In Rochester, where there are 28 courses with no repeated sections, the merged high school would mean a 311 percent increase in course offerings.
Paige feels that taking AP classes in high school was the single best preparation for the rigors of college-level coursework — not just because students who score a 3 out of a possible 5 on an AP exam can often earn college credits, but also because the coursework helped her develop stronger study habits and time management skills.
“I think the ability to get college credit, and taking classes that are more on par with the academic rigor of a college classroom, is perhaps one of the major educational benefits that (would) come out of the merger,” she wrote. “There (would) be enough students to justify having these classes, and more students with diversified interests, so perhaps even more AP classes and other classes can be offered.”
Grace LaFromboise, a ninth-grader at Whitcomb, has placed out of her algebra class and is now taking geometry with 10th-graders. She wants to try her hand at an AP class, but Whitcomb doesn’t offer any.
“I guess I just think I have more potential than that, to be just put into a group for older people,” she said. “But that’s all I can do right now.”
She wants to take more science classes than Whitcomb Senior High offers, too. “I really want to understand how things work,” she said. “I want to learn about space and astronomy.”
Earth & Space could be one of the new STEM classes made available to Bethel high schoolers under the merger, as could Principles of Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, AP Chemistry, AP Calculus and AP Statistics.
“I really like my school, but think I deserve the chance to challenge myself more than I am challenged now,” LaFromboise said.
Sandwiched in the Middle
The merger would allow the White River Valley Union Middle School to operate as a so-called “true” or “pure” middle school model, which is one with an identity that is separate from elementary and high school grade levels.
The pure model is recommended by both the University of Vermont’s Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education and the Middle Grades Collaborative, organizations that provide professional development for educators in Vermont. Labs said this was because “middle schoolers often take a back seat to the needs of younger and older students. They’re sandwiched in the middle, and so teachers and resources and energies often get pulled away from them in one direction or the other.”
In the merged middle school, each grade would be divided into teams, with each team having its own set of teachers for math, science, social studies and language arts. This would allow class sizes to stay relatively small, at around 15 to 17 students as opposed to six to eight students, while also encouraging “strong relationships with adult mentors,” he said.
Because teachers would not be stretched so thin between grade levels, they would have more opportunities to work together on interdisciplinary lesson plans, said Dean Stearns, principal at the South Royalton School.
For example, he said, “take the human body.” Students could study the different body systems in science class, perform calculations related to the body for math class, learn about early bipedal humans in social studies and write about what they’ve learned for language arts.
Along with this more interdiscplinary scope, the merged middle school also would offer more flexibility in students’ schedules, Labs said. Generally, because of the practical needs of the K-12 model, middle schoolers at the three schools are currently bound by the same bell schedules as high school students.
“That’s not necessarily the best model you could create for the middle school level,” Labs said. “But you just can’t have a school with students from all three grade levels and not standardize some things.”
The merged middle school would do away with bell schedules as a hard-and-fast necessity, he said. “Instead, teachers could expand their lesson plans to optimize the material in a way they couldn’t otherwise.”
He added that, under the merger, many more teachers would have the chance to undergo middle school-specific professional development training through both the Tarrant Institute and the Middle Grades Collaborative.
“Right now, we’re sending people as we can,” Labs said. “It’s more of a trickle. If this passes, we’ll be able to send them en masse.”
It’s important to train middle school teachers specifically for those grades, because middle school is a time of flux for many students.
“Kids have very distinct learning needs at that level,” he added. “They’re going through massive changes, they’re thinking about and questioning a lot of things, and it’s such a natural progression of growing up.”
The Great Outdoors
Both middle school and high school students would also have access to the planned Center for Experiential and Environmental Learning in Rochester. The center, would offer courses on a 15-acre parcel of land in the Green Mountain National Forest, where students could participate in hands-on, self-directed research projects, Labs said.
“Kids can practice ornithology, biology and plant science, they can study the river, they can go out and write poetry, or do a hike in the woods for phys ed class,” he said. “That kind of education is the stuff that sticks with you — not just the things you heard, but the things you were actually engaged with.”
Stearns said that this experiential learning allows all types of students — not just traditional or college-bound ones — to become “active participants in their own educations.
“There are kids who just aren’t going to be engaged sitting in an algebra or U.S. history class,” he said. “But when you put them in the forest and ask them a question and tell them to go solve it, the student who thrives at that might also be the student who doesn’t do well being lectured to for an hour and 20 minutes.”
Though high school juniors and seniors currently have access to alternative, hands-on learning through the Randolph Technical Career Center, the CEEL would be open to students of all grade levels, including elementary school students, Labs said.
“It wouldn’t replace RTCC whatsoever,” Labs said. “That’s a myth. Students could still do RTCC and participate in the CEEL. It’s just offering a different kind of learning opportunity.”
Access to hands-on activities through extracurriculars would also increase with the merger, Labs said.
“We would have a bigger band, one that actually has a trumpet player and a saxophone player and a drummer. We would have a bigger chorus,” he said. “We’d like to add dance. We’d like to have every kid get what they want and need.”
Geo Honigford pointed out that there are currently no after-school clubs at any of the three high schools.
“They just don’t exist, and not for lack of interest,” he said. “We just don’t have the bodies. You can’t have a chess club or a mock court team with only two kids.”
And because there are no junior varsity sports teams at any of the three high schools, younger students are often assigned to varsity by default, but face several years sitting on the sidelines before getting any real playing time, Labs said.
How Small is Too Small?
The Act 46 study committee surveyed the community “like crazy,” Labs said, including students, parents, teachers and town residents, and was able to glean some common threads from respondents. One of the most notable threads, he said, was that students expressed the desire to be with more students.
Small class sizes can be a good thing — a high teacher-student ratio is usually something for schools to boast about, as it implies more specialized attention to each student — but when class sizes are consistently in the single digits, “it actually does a disservice to the kids,” Labs said. “You don’t get that cross-section of people with different ideas and experiences, and good conversation, if you only have six kids in the class. Some AP classes at South Royalton only have three kids,” he added.
Grace LaFromboise, the Whitcomb ninth-grader, said she is happy with the amount of individual attention each student gets in her small classes, but she is curious to know more kids.
“A lot of the kids from all three high schools already know each other and get along pretty well,” she said, pointing out that some of the Bethel and Rochester sports teams are already merged. “But this would be a great opportunity to get to know more people that we don’t know so well — which is important for us to experience because that’s what’s going to happen in the real world.”
She said most of her classes at Whitcomb have between six and eight students.
At Royalton, the largest of the three schools, roughly half the classes at South Royalton have fewer than seven students, Labs said.
Cora Honigford said that most of her senior year classes had the same five or six students, and she craved more voices.
“If we wanted to have a discussion about what we were learning, then that was kind of just too bad,” she said. “It’s not really a discussion without that diversity of opinions and perspectives.”
But there are also concerns that doing away with such small class sizes would sacrifice the amount of individual attention students would receive from teachers.
Shaun Pickett, who was the principal of the South Royalton School from 1986 to 2012, remembers when school enrollment was in its “heyday,” about 15 years ago, with approximately 570 students. (Current enrollment, pre-K to 12 is 390.)
He loved the sense of community that the K-12 model fostered. “It’s great to have kids who all know each other, who went to school there since kindergarten, and it builds great community,” he said. “It’s a great model — but only if you have the numbers to support it.”
As enrollment at the South Royalton School dwindled, so did the programs the school was able to offer its students.
“At one point, we were able to offer multiple sections of foreign languages, including a freshman intro level, but gradually we had to cut those way back. We had a number of (Advanced Placement) courses, but eventually we had to start offering some of them every other year,” he said. “Oh gosh, and just in terms of sports, we had a freshman team, a JV team and a varsity team,” whereas varsity is now the umbrella team for all ages.
“Gradually, as enrollment started to drop, it affected us in a number of different ways,” he said. “And then, pretty soon, it affected us in every way.”
Though Pickett believes in what the K-12 model stands for, “once you get really small — like, fewer than 10 kids in a classroom small — it creates problems with what you’re trying to do,” he said. “It also affects the diversity of the class, not just in terms of obvious things like gender, but also where the kids are coming from and what they’re interested in. Peer groups become much smaller, and kids can have difficulty with that.”
The White River Valley Union High School, with a total of 230 students and approximately 58 students per grade, would “still be a tiny school by Vermont standards,” Geo Honigford said. “All we’re doing is taking three little dinky schools and making them into one less-small but still-small school.”
Nancy Cyphers, a Bethel school board member and former teacher, said while small classes foster strong relationships among students and educators, there is also a certain “give and take where the students learn just as much, if not more, from each other than from a program,” she said. “And if the kids are saying they want to try this, I think there’s got to be a reason for it.”
Pickett echoed this sentiment.
“Whether or not this proposal that’s out there is the best for Royalton, that’s something that Royalton’s going to have to decide. But I do know that this shrinking enrollment that currently exists is not what I remember as being the best part of a K-12 system,” he said. “So something needs to happen.”
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at eholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.