Transforming the school district

Big changes are in store for the Lawrence School District’s high school and middle school to accommodate the implementation of the Princeton Plan next September. The plan organizes school districts based on grade levels rather than where people live in the community.
The district has spent approximately $300,000 so far on revamping the Transportation Office, which moved from the second floor of the middle school to the lower level, and gutting the guidance area in the high school.
In total, the district is planning a $5 million renovation that includes moving Central Administration, the superintendent and assistant superintendents from the middle school to new offices in the high school, renovating the high school’s main office, creating a new guidance area, opening up more space for science research and retooling the Student Health And Risk Prevention area.
At the middle school, where lower and upper schools would be created to accommodate third- to fifth-graders and sixth- to eighth-graders as part of the new district alignment, 22 new classrooms would be added, along with music and technology suites. The music areas would include space for chorus, band and orchestra. The principal of the lower school, Rina Beach, and her staff would set up shop in the former Transportation Office.
The money the district would use for the project is part of the proceeds it expects to receive from the $8.6 million sale of the Number Six School to the Hebrew Academy of Long Beach last year.

Lawrence is also hoping that in an April 1 referendum, community members will vote to allow the district to add the $5 million to its capital reserve fund for the planned renovations.
“This plan benefits the students, the district and the taxpayer,” said Superintendent Gary Schall. “In the unlikely case that the referendum fails, we would present it again on the May budget vote, and make contingency plans due to the delayed timeline.”
The plans have been sent to the State Department of Education for review, Schall said.
The district’s restructuring would include keeping pre-K and kindergarten students at the Number Four School and using the Number Two School exclusively for first and second grades. The Number Five School would be leased to an organization that caters to special-needs children. Its top floor would accommodate the 105 special-needs students who now attend schools outside the district.

More research space
High school chemistry teacher Rebecca Isseroff has spearheaded student science research in the Five Towns for the past 14 years, and her list of honorees in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology and the Intel Science Talent Search grows longer each year. It now includes the 2014 Siemens semifinalist team of Lee Blackburn and Arthur Chen, Lawrence High juniors, and Justin Lish, a junior at the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway.
Isseroff is perennially space-challenged, but her research area would grow substantially with the renovation of the high school. A half dozen computers are now crowded next to one another, without much room between the desks. Isseroff has a cabinet full of graphene samples, a substance some students are researching, not too far from a lab table. Entering and exiting requires walking through a classroom.
“We have a whole lot of stuff to do; we just need the room to do it,” Isseroff said. “Some more room for work — that would be nice.”

Increasing academic rigor
The planned realignment is an outgrowth of what district officials learned when the high school had to be closed for nearly four months after it was damaged in Hurricane Sandy, and students were moved to the middle school and from the middle school to the elementary schools, Schall said.
But, he added, improving student achievement is the main goal of all of the changes that are planned. Using building space properly, especially at the middle school, would allow teachers to have “breakout” sessions with students, for which they would have more space to provide either advanced study or remedial work.
Deputy Superintendent Dr. Ann Pedersen said that the emphasis at the Number Two School would be math and developmental reading, including weekly time with a math specialist. Science would be added to the elementary schedule, and a portion of students would take bilingual Spanish classes.
“We will be creating focus clusters of class,” Pedersen said, “to enable the students — first to eighth grade — who can handle the rigor of higher reading material, and those that need remediation, to have their time in class maximized to meet their needs.”

Have an opinion about the changes in Lawrence schools? Send your letter to the editor to jbessen@liherald.com.