The first day of school will ring in a host of changes for the nearly 40,000 South Sound students expected to return to their classrooms during the next two weeks.
Many of those changes are the result of financial aftershocks from the Legislature’s staggering $1 billion cut in funding for public schools across the state.
Some districts, including Rainier, Rochester and Tenino, resume classes this week. Students in Thurston County’s three largest public school systems – Olympia, North Thurston and Tumwater – head back to school Sept. 7.
Here’s what families can expect:
LESS LEARNING TIME
Students in the Olympia School District will have three fewer school days than they’ve had in the past.
Leaders of the 9,400-student district obtained a state waiver to shorten the school year for students from 180 to 177 days. Teachers will be required to attend staff training during the three nonstudent days, district spokesman Peter Rex said.
Nonstudent days will save the district thousands of dollars in salary costs for nonteaching employees, such as cafeteria workers, bus drivers and other classified staff members.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, officials in the 6,300-student Tumwater School District announced that teachers will be furloughed for three half-days during the school year. As a result, students will be released from school early on Nov. 23, Dec. 16 and Feb. 3.
COST-SAVING APPROACHES
When River Ridge High School in Lacey opened in 1993, its school-within-a-school model was hailed as a way to give students and families extra support.
The 1,165-student school was divided into four separate “houses” that featured their own attendance secretaries, part-time counselors and half-time facilitators who essentially served as deans.
Although many families loved the house system, it was expensive for the 13,950-student North Thurston Public Schools to maintain under budget restraints.
“You had a lot of duplication of effort,” said Jill Geyen, a science teacher who also served as a half-time facilitator at the school for several years.
School officials spent nearly a year preparing for the “collapse of the house system,” according to principal Karen Remy-Anderson. During the summer, crews built a central administrative office at the school and remodeled former house offices into six more classrooms. The $250,000 remodeling was paid for with a construction bond that passed in 2006.
In addition to a new look, the school will adopt a more traditional high school model, Remy-Anderson said. Students will go to a main office to check in for attendance or make an appointment with a counselor.
And instead of each house having its own English classroom, the school will have a language arts hall. Social studies, math and science will each have their own halls as well.
Teachers who teach the same subjects will have classrooms that are closer together, providing for more collaboration.
“There’s a lot more opportunity for informal communication,” Remy-Anderson said.
Staff members are excited about the transition, Geyen said. The old system could feel a bit isolating at times for some staff members, and made it challenging to plan school-wide events.
“We’ll truly feel like we’re part of a community,” Geyen said. “We won’t feel as separated.”
The remodel also created more classroom space, which will help the school accommodate projected growth, Remy-Anderson said.
NEW PROGRAMS
An advanced math and science program will be offered at Jefferson Middle School in Olympia. The program is drawing sixth-graders from across the district and is slated to add seventh-graders next year and eighth-graders for the 2013-14 school year.
Rainier Elementary School has begun offering full-day kindergarten, with no tuition costs to families, according to superintendent Tim Garchow.
And many South Sound schools – including all of the elementary schools in North Thurston, Olympia and Tumwater, as well as some middle and high schools – are implementing or continuing to build on a discipline program called Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS.
The philosophy behind the program is that good behavior happens if expectations are taught, just like math, science and other school subjects.
“The whole foundation is we need to approach behavior as we do academics,” said Katy Lehman, a PBIS specialist for North Thurston Public Schools.
She estimates about 8,000 schools across the country have adopted the discipline model.
Instead of focusing on disciplining troublesome students, PBIS gives extra support to students with behavioral problems and rewards students who make good choices.
For example, tickets might be handed out to students who exhibited good behavior during an assembly, which could be entered into a drawing for prizes at the end of the year.
All 13 North Thurston elementary schools began using PBIS a year ago.
“We saw anywhere from a 30 to 50 percent decrease in office referrals,” Lehman said.
The system has a multi-year tiered approach and has been credited for improving student learning and reducing bullying problems.
NEW CONSTRUCTION
In the Olympia School District, crews are finishing new roofs on several school buildings, including the final roof repair at Capital High School.
A 5,200-square-foot addition with four new classrooms will open at Pioneer Elementary School. The $1.2 million construction project is being paid for with local levy and bond revenue, as well as the collection of school impact fees.
Pioneer Principal Randy Weeks said the new classrooms will help alleviate growing pains in the southeast Olympia school.
“We were just bursting at the seams,” he said. “ … They taught reading in my office every morning last year.”
North Thurston Public Schools is wrapping up about $3.6 million in summer construction projects, ranging from the remodeling at River Ridge, to roof, lighting and maintenance jobs at various sites.
In the Rochester School District, an $811,000 energy efficiency grant paid for new heat pumps, a cooling tower, temperature controls and lighting at Rochester High School, according to Rochester Superintendent Kim Fry. “Students should experience brighter classrooms and comfortable temperatures,” she said. “The grant also provided 100 new thin client-virtual desktop computers in each of our schools.”
Lisa Pemberton: 360-754-5433
lpemberton@theolympian.com
