Faced with declining student enrollment and perceptions of troubling academic underachievement, Bolinas-Stinson Union School District officials are discussing combining grades to free up time for a few teachers to act as roaming academic specialists described by the district’s principal, Jason Richardson, as “teachers on special assignment.”
Enrollment this year of the district’s kindergarten through eighth grade students is 100, down from 119 in 2012, and it is expected to fall further next year. The small student body has left some classes with only six students—too few, some have opined, to merit one teacher’s full attention while other teachers manage larger classes.
“By measures that would be applied anywhere else, we are overstaffed,” said John Carroll, the district’s superintendent. “We have a lot of resources. We have a lot of teachers.”
At a board of trustees meeting Tuesday night, Mr. Richardson presented a rough plan to reconfigure the district’s classroom structure by combining first and second grades as well as fourth and fifth grades. How that reconfiguration ultimately shakes out, he cautioned, would depend on the number of future kindergartener enrollees. “We don’t really know our incoming numbers,” he said. “We’re wanting to be flexible with how we structure our primary classes.”
Importantly, the classroom shift would leave two teachers available for special assignment, which Mr. Richardson envisions as a way to give additional math and intervention support across multiple grades. He and Mr. Carroll have the authority to appoint any teacher to a special assignment role, and all of the district’s eight certificated classroom teachers are credentialed to teach multiple subjects.
“We’re brainstorming the kinds of things these teachers on special assignment would do,” Mr. Richardson said. “But this would allow us to have three distinct math classes in the middle school.”
It’s this focus on improving math instruction that many parents are most eager to inject into the district, where they say math fell by the wayside long ago in favor of less orthodox classes like gardening and outdoor learning. A growing number of parents have said they’re spending hundreds of dollars each month on private math tutoring.
“We’ve been screaming about this for years,” said Erika Lowry, a Stinson Beach parent whose eighth-grade daughter has logged around 90 hours of private math tutoring from a Mill Valley service called Mathnasium. “We really need a strong math person in the middle school.”
Data acquired last year by Mr. Carroll from Tamalpais Union High School District show only 15 percent of Bolinas-Stinson students entering freshman year enrolled in advanced-level math classes, compared to 52 percent of their peers. Similarly, 36 percent of Bolinas-Stinson students were enrolled in below-grade-level math courses, compared to eight percent of all Tam High freshmen. And whereas 84 percent of all Tam High students eventually went on to take an advanced algebra course, only 31 percent of graduates from Bolinas-Stinson graduates did so.
From these figures and their own observations of a disconnect between school grades and standardized test scores, many parents fear the district’s curriculum may not adequately prepare their children to enter high school or, later, be accepted into college. Several parents have even removed their children mid-year from the district—and in waves, according to Stinson Beach resident Tara Boyce.
“We’ve either already taken our kids out or are planning to take them out at the end of the year,” said Ms. Boyce, who removed her third-grade son from the district in January and does not intend to matriculate her preschool-aged daughter into kindergarten. “[The district] is graduating kids from the middle school level who will never meet college-entry standards. They’re systematically disenfranchised.”
Several parents and trustees, however, were quick to defend Bolinas-Stinson’s academic methodology, affirming that the more unorthodox classes can even assist in providing a better comprehension of core subjects.
“Project-based learning is a methodology that delivers standards,” said Mollie Lounibos, an art teacher at Casa Grande High School in Petaluma whose son attends first grade at Bolinas-Stinson. “My son was the recipient of an incredible, breathtaking education that I, as a teacher and educator, was astounded and completely enamored by.”
Likewise, longtime trustee Jennie Pfeiffer noted that since she became involved in the district in the 1980s, classes have always worked to meet the same academic standards as other public schools.
“Just because a class has project-based learning does not mean they’re not teaching the standards,” Ms. Pfeiffer said. “I get that you have difficulties. But I do want us to appreciate the fact that a lot of effort and thought and time has been put into making sure our kids have what they need.”
Ms. Pfeiffer’s comments prompted outcry from Ms. Boyce, who reiterated that it is a lack of math curriculum that has been driving students away from the district. She claimed that 27 students from Stinson Beach had left the district since 2007, “not because of [a lack of affordable housing], but because of the quality of the education they had received.”
Other parents and school officials are loathe to place blame squarely on inadequate teaching instruction. Rather, they have pegged the cause of lower enrollment numbers on a lack of affordable housing in Bolinas and Stinson Beach.
“Families can’t live here, and most of our staff no longer live in West Marin,” said trustee Arianne Dar, who will step down from the board in November after serving 12 years. “That is a huge problem. Hence the need for multi-age classrooms to have enough kids to work with each other and be a cohort.”
Mr. Carroll and Mr. Richardson said on Tuesday that they aim to strengthen the district’s learning standards.
“We need to catch up on a systematic transition into the Common Core standards,” Mr. Richardson. “We’re doing that, but it takes some time.”