HISD transitioning some campuses to K-8

"Sometimes you just need to see it for yourself before you make up your mind," said Ortega, whose daughter attends McReynolds Middle School, one of the campuses that HISD is considering reconfiguring to combine elementary and middle school grades.

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Many Houston parents have been slow to warm to the idea of campuses that include children as young as pre-kindergarten with eighth-graders — a reform being embraced by urban districts across the nation to try to increase performance among 11- to 13-year-olds.

Philadelphia, for instance, plans to convert nearly all of its campuses to so-called K-8s by next school year. Chicago, Baltimore and Milwaukee are among other cities embracing the model.

Houston leaders are anxious to add more K-8 campuses but find themselves facing an uphill battle.

Parents in predominately African-American neighborhoods vocally opposed a plan to consolidate several schools in their communities into K-8 campuses, prompting the district to abandon that proposal before last month's $805 million bond election.

Administrators are still planning to expand the K-8 model to other schools, if they can sell the idea to the community.

Pilgrim and Rusk elementaries already are in the process of expanding, officials said, and HISD is slated to expand Wilson Elementary, a Montessori program, to a K-8 campus next school year. A new school planned to relieve overcrowding at Dowling Middle School might also be configured as a combined elementary and middle campus, said Karen Soehnge, HISD's chief academic officer.

Better sales pitch needed

HISD administrators admit they'll have to make a better sales pitch. "It's a foreign concept," Soehnge said. "It's not something all people are accustomed to."

Yet K-8 is one of the most popular models for private schools. It was also the most popular configuration for public schools 100 years ago.

By the 1960s, however, the model had given way to seventh- through ninth-grade junior highs and then sixth- through eighth-grade middle schools — configurations designed to ensure that adolescents had the academic and social opportunities needed to prepare for high school.

Struggling academic performance among today's middle schoolers is causing the pendulum to swing back toward K-8s. One of the biggest perks, educators said, is that students aren't tripped up during the disruptive year that they transition to middle school.

By staying on the same campus, kids can focus on academics, rather than being forced to re-establish themselves socially. Teachers are able to establish solid relationships with families. As a result, parents are more apt to stay involved with the campus through the middle school years, experts said.

Study casts doubt

One drawback is that K-8s aren't able to offer the same number of electives or athletic programs as comprehensive middle schools.

Houston leaders said the school closures proposed in the recent bond election were so contentious that families weren't even willing to weigh the pros and cons of K-8 configurations that were part of the plan. And unlike the effort at McReynolds, parents in the impacted neighborhoods weren't taken on field trips to visit successful K-8s.

"There was not the opportunity for meaningful dialogue to really comprehend and understand what the K-8 model brought to the educational setting," said Manuel Rodriguez Jr., president of the Houston school board.

HISD won't force the reform on parents, he said. Administrators said they'll hold community meetings in 2008 at any campus that they're considering restructuring.

Though leaders of many urban districts are convinced that the model is beneficial, the research is harder to decipher.

A recent study by Johns Hopkins University, for instance, cast doubt on whether students in Philadelphia's recently converted K-8 programs are outperforming their peers in traditional middle schools. Favorable attendance and behavioral data might be skewed by student bodies that include lower percentages of poor and minority students, researchers said.

The bottom line is, K-8 configurations must be a good fit for the families affected, experts said.

"It's not the magic bullet that's going to make you close an achievement gap," said Douglas Sears, associate provost at Boston University and former dean of its education school.

Rice School Principal Linda Lazenby said she's thrilled her 1,100-student campus can serve as the poster child of success for the K-8 model in Houston.

The school, which is 90 percent minority and 60 percent low income, earned "recognized" ratings from the state in 2006-07.

"There's a sense of innocence we maintain," she said. "There's a sense of keeping them children."

jennifer.radcliffe@chron.com