District to close Stephensen

Stephensen Middle School on base will be closed next year, the Mountain Home school board has decided, a result of declining enrollments on base and the budget crunch caused by the cuts in state funding.

The decision will mean major changes at Hacker Middle School in town, where many of the students will be bused. In the past five years enrollment in the base schools has dropped from 1,074 students to 836 students, a 22 percent decline.

"We just can't keep that up," said Supt. Jerrie LeFevre. "We'd already trimmed ten-plus teachers out of the airbase schools in the last two years and we'd reached a point where we were offering almost a minimum curriculum."

The district moved the eighth- and ninth-grade students to the town junior high two years ago.

Next year, the seventh-grade students, between 80 and 100 students, will be bused to Hacker. The seventh-grade teachers at Stephensen also will move to Hacker.

That will result in the sixth-grade students being moved back to Liberty Elementary and the third grade at Liberty being moved back to the base primary school.

"That will still leave us with five to six empty classrooms" at the base schools, LeFevre said.

Expected changes in the demographics on base also prompted the move. The B-1 crews, which will be leaving soon, tend to be a little older, LeFevre noted, while the fighter pilots (and their support crews) tend to be younger and are expected to have fewer school-age children.

The district had made it clear at the start of the year one of the schools on base would be closed. Stephensen was selected based primarily on operations and maintenance costs to keep it open, as opposed to Liberty.

The district does not see the closure as permanent. Stephensen's library and much of its furniture will remain there, although the computers and technology lab will be moved to Hacker. Otherwise, LeFevre said, if the building were cleaned out, it would cost over $400,000 just to reopen the building.

"We feel this will probably last about two years," he said, noting that the building is being offered on a two-year lease to the Air Force and the various colleges that have programs on base. "After that, we'd go with one-year leases with 90-day notices when we'd want it back," he said.

Another factor in the decision to close Stephensen was a desire to continue the K-4 "neighborhood" school concept. But that will prompt some major changes at Hacker Middle School, which handles grades 5-7.

To accommodate the new students the fifth grade at Hacker will be moved to the annex, where the district has designed a "school within a school." Except for music, PE and lunch, the 5th-grade students will remain in the annex, which will be remodeled this summer. Some of the rooms will be divided into two classrooms, and the stage will be converted to a classroom. "That's back to where we were in the '60s," LeFevre said, when overcrowding forced classes to be held on school stages.

Classroom sizes will be smaller, and so will the teaching staffs assigned to those classrooms. The district spent years developing the middle school concept, with "teams" of three teachers working each classroom. Now those teams will be cut to two teachers and some of the exploratory programs will be trimmed, such as drama and journalism.

In place of the exploratory offerings, the district will increase the science and social studies programs from one semester to two.

Although the exploratory programs were popular, LeFevre said the changes coincided with a major review of curriculum, aimed at the new state standards.

LeFevre said the "extras" were cut in order to focus on core subjects. "When kids can't meet the reading standards, then we have to do something."

He praised the staff at Hacker for their efforts to completely redesign the curriculum in just a few months, a process that normally takes up to two years.

"The staff has really stepped up," he said. For example, "I really appreciate the staff's involvement in designing a new reading program for struggling readers at that school."

The district already has two programs operating for poor readers, one for students who have special needs, and one for students where english is their second language. Both of those are federally funded programs.

But some students, he said, didn't meet the formal criteria for those two programs, but were still struggling. Sometimes it was because of problems at home, or emotional problems, or other reasons, but whatever the cause, some students not qualified for the other "emphasis" programs were reading two or more grade levels below what they should be reading, despite the Accelerated Reading Program in the elementary schools that has greatly improved student reading performance at those levels.

"These are kids who have the skills, but are behind in practice, in comprehension, in applying what they read," LeFevre said.

"We feel we've got to do this for the kids," he said. "This is not special ed kids. This is for your average, run-of-the-mill kids who for one reason or another have not picked up on reading instruction."

In effect, he said, the new Reading Recovery Program will re-teach the kids how to read.

"We're really targeting these kids," he said, because if a student can't read or understand what he or she has read, it affects their learning it all their other classes.

The emphasis is not just at Hacker, however. At the junior high and the high school, for example, a Satellite English program is being launched that once again will target those students not qualified for the traditonal remedial programs. The new program will work on basic phonics, syntax and other language skills.

The new programs are being launched as the district is facing budget shortfalls from state funding that will cause it to abandon purchasing textbooks this year, but while the state is still insisting on all districts meeting the new, tougher state standards that will be evaluated with a series of tests.

"We're not going to use (those problems) as an excuse," LeFevre said. "We're going to make sure these kids are prepared for both the tests and for life" beyond school, he insisted.

This year's freshman class will be the first to face the new testing standards for graduation, and already have "tested" the tests. To meet those standards the district is slowly phasing out the current curriculum in areas such as social studies, and developing a multi-year "course of study" that should be fully implemented by fall of 2003.

"We've got a lot of changes to make, but the staff has really come through, and we'll have everything in place in time," LeFevre said.