K-8 Schools a Textbook Example of Efficiency, Backers Say

When the Fountain Valley school board considered converting Fred Moiola Elementary School’s kindergarten-through-eighth-grade format to K-5 and sending upper-graders to middle schools, it sparked anxiety in a typically quiet district.

Armed with charts, test scores and protest signs, hundreds of parents, students and alumni pleaded with the board to preserve a campus described as nurturing and family-like.

After reviewing the study, school trustees agreed in February to keep Moiola as is. Enrollment shot up when classes started in September.

“Once we got over that big decision, it was a good thing for us to go through,” Fountain Valley Supt. Marc Ecker said. “What grew out of that was a choice.”

It’s a choice only a few Orange County public school districts offer. K-8 schools are all but gone.

Fountain Valley’s Moiola, Vista Verde School in Irvine and Travis Ranch Elementary and Middle School in Yorba Linda are the only K-8 public schools listed in the county school directory.

Each offers middle school-style instruction in the upper grades and a traditional elementary style in the lower grades. Different schedules separate the children most of the day, but there is interaction through buddy programs, tutoring and physical education.

“I think the advantage to a K-through-8 is you have a wider spread of children under the same roof,” said Bruce Terry, Vista Verde principal. “For me, that means we get to know the children for nine years and they become like family to us.”

At Terry’s school, upper-graders teach athletics and tutor lower-graders in reading. At Travis Ranch, a literature program allows older kids to share books with the youngsters.

“There’s a feeling that it’s safer and that kids don’t grow up too fast in a K-8 setting,” Travis Principal Ginny Trapani said. “There’s more sense of community in a K-through-8.”

The K-8 configuration is comfortable and safe for many children, said Linda MacDonnell, director of instructional services at the Orange County Department of Education.

“They’re still in a nurturing environment,” she said.

“Kids still stay connected,” she said, but in comparison to middle schools, “I wouldn’t say one is necessarily better than the other. They work for some kids, but they don’t work for others.”

More are on the way. Orange’s McPherson Magnet School opened last month as a K-6 but will add seventh and eighth grades before 2000. Las Flores School in the new South County subdivision of the same name becomes K-8 next fall. Capistrano Valley Unified School District, which runs Las Flores, lost another K-8 campus, Fred Newhart Elementary School in Mission Viejo, during a boundary change earlier this year.

During a recent visit to promote his statewide class-size reduction efforts, Gov. Pete Wilson lauded Vista Verde’s programs.

Though no one contacted could recall how many K-8 schools Orange County had at their peak, officials gave reasons they were closed or consolidated.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Ecker said, enrollment was decreasing in developed parts of the county such as Fountain Valley. There, enrollment was so low it was easier to cluster middle school-age kids. Rapid growth in other areas had the same effect.

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The real push from the late 1970s to the early 1990s was to give middle school children specialized instruction--something between primary and high school.

“Many districts did it because they wanted to offer an alternative program for middle school kids,” said John Tennant, assistant superintendent of human resources at Ocean View School District in Huntington Beach, which eliminated its K-8 schools about five years ago. The ideology reaches back 10 years to “Caught in the Middle,” a state Department of Education report that described junior high schools as isolating and suggested a different approach: middle schools.

Supporters say middle schools give students more personalized attention than the junior high model, including more class time with the same teachers. Some middle schools also do away with high school trappings, such as lockers.

“The junior high model, whether it was seventh to eighth or seventh, eighth, ninth, was basically a mini high school,” said Dennis Evans, director of teaching credential programs at UC Irvine. “The middle school movement was to try and get away from that and get more of a sense of community.”

The report suggested nurturing children at a halfway point between primary and high school where “home” and “core” teachers give students a sense of connectedness.

Because of the popularity of middle schools, many K-8 schools were eliminated. Still, K-8 fans say it’s better for students to stay in elementary schools longer.

“I am not in any hurry for any of them to grow up,” said Terry, the Vista Verde principal.

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Also contributing to this report was Times librarian Lois Hooker.