Newly Elected Board Will Decide the Fate of Middle School Proposal : Education: New members will fill four of five seats. The panel must rule in January in order for the facility to open by next fall.

Whether to create a middle school in Beverly Hills appears to be the first major decision for a school board with four newly elected members.

Beverly Hills administrators have been looking at the matter for a long time, but cuts made over the past decade are making the concept more attractive and timely.

“This has been an ongoing issue for the past 10 years,” said Frank Fenton, a school board member. “We finally decided last year that we should make a decision on whether we should go to a middle school or drop the whole thing.”

In order for the 1,000-student middle school is to be opened by the fall of 1992, the school board must decide by January whether to go ahead with the plan. Four of five school board seats will be filled by newly elected members who will take office in December.

Supporters of the middle school believe it would strengthen an educational program hit by $7 million in cuts over the past decade.

Programs outside of the core curriculum, such as music and art, suffered the most from the cuts. Meanwhile, as enrollments declined, the number of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders dwindled at each of the district’s four kindergarten through eighth-grade elementary schools. As a result, about 20 teachers travel from school to school to teach music, art and language to these middle-school age children. The time they spend on the road amounts to two full-time teaching positions, said Dick Douglas, principal of Hawthorne Elementary School.

The cuts also claimed the orchestra program and physical education teachers. Classroom teachers who used to spend mornings preparing for lectures now brave the blacktop instead, giving their students the best workout they know how.

Douglas and a group of teachers, at the request of the district, studied the middle school concept for Beverly Hills. Their report, submitted to the board last month, was the result of six months of research and community input.

According to the report, a consolidated middle school could offer a stronger and more varied curriculum with extras such as journalism, public speaking and leadership. Extracurricular activities, such as clubs and sports, would be vastly improved.

The middle school would allow staff to better meet the unique needs of an excitable, rapidly evolving age group, the report says.

“Peers start to play an enormous role in their development,” Douglas said of middle-school aged children. “And they are extremely active and have a great desire to express themselves. We can play on that. We can create an educational program where we put them in groups, for instance, where we can appeal to that peer pressure . . . . To have a teacher stand in front of the classroom and lecture for 50 minutes is deadly.”

The middle school would also ease the transition from a structured elementary school atmosphere to the disconnected, multiple period atmosphere of high school.

The district also hired a consultant to determine what would be the best site for the new school. Beverly Vista Elementary school was chosen because it was the largest facility and could house the middle school population with the least amount of modification.

A series of public hearings will be held beginning Thursday, Nov. 14. New school board members will be asked to attend.

“I think it’s a wonderful concept,” said Lillian Raffel, a newly elected board member. “But I’m still waiting for all the hearings.”

Even though the middle school concept is strongly supported, there are several logistical problems. For example, the new school would supplant kindergarten through fifth-grade students now attending Beverly Vista.

The study estimates that it would cost about $190,000 to convert Beverly Vista into a middle school. The district should be able to run the school with existing personnel.