A friend sent me a copy of an article from the Seattle Times with the headline,“School size: Is smaller really better?” He sent it as a sort of caution — that my enthusiasm for smaller schools might be illusory, that I might simply be advocating today’s latest fad.
The article was about Mountlake Terrace High School in Edmonds, Wash., that“was supposed to lead the way in the national movement to remake large high schools into smaller ones…” The transformation was supported by the Gates Foundation, which the paper reported, is now moving away from “its emphasis on converting large high schools into smaller ones.”
At least 40 years ago, large high schools were trying to break themselves into smaller units by establishing house plans. There would be a house principal and guidance staff to which students were assigned. Freshmen were generally scheduled to take courses within their house.
But older students moved around the whole school, faculty served the entire student body and soon the house plan structure became just an administrative fiction. Students had no concept of the house to which they were assigned and did not care.
In Edmonds, where different variations on the small school approach are apparently being tried, a spokesperson says, “The traditional high school, with its wide range of courses, remains unchanged for juniors and seniors.” In other words, small is only for freshmen and sophomores. It breaks down after that and everyone goes back to being part of a large high school. That sounds a lot like the old house plan.
Providing an emphasis
The new movement towards creating small schools within larger ones is more than that. Instead of arbitrarily assigning students to House A or House B, efforts are being made to establish themes for schools — music and art, science and technology, public policy, careers orientation, etc. Thus, a student who has an interest in a particular area presumably will gravitate to a small school that supports that interest and will stay with that school through four years.
I’m not sure that breaking an existing high school into a group of small schools is really going to work –- breaking small schools out of large high schools and into a separate space seems to me more likely to be successful — but if a large high school is going to be broken into smaller units, and the separation is going to be maintained, I believe that at least four physical conditions must exist for the small schools to gain and retain their individual characteristics.
Each small school must have its own entrance.
Each small school must have its own cafeteria/commons.
Each small school must have its own lavatories.
Each small school must have its own administrative center.
Without those four physical characteristics, small schools within larger ones will not work for long. Why these four?
When students enter and exit at the same place and the same time, any tensions that exist in or outside school, any slights, any problems, any inter-school squabbles get exacerbated. In communities where school violence occurs, it is often when students are arriving or leaving.
By the same token, lunch periods with thousands of students are noisy, messy and difficult to control. The same factors that occur when all students enter and leave together occur in the large school cafeteria. On the positive side, if each school has its own cafeteria, it becomes a gathering place for that school, a meeting area, a place for the school to do its business. Used properly, it can be an important symbol.
Lavatories are a third problem area in any school. By providing facilities within the small school, students do not wander into areas where they are strangers or not wanted, do not disrupt activities in other schools and do not find an easy place to hide.
As for an administrative center, once again, it provides a focus for the school. How the school is operated is a school decision. Each school can have its own atmosphere and rules. If all administrators are in one large center, the tendency will be for everything to be determined on a large-school basis, without proper consideration of the individual units.
No one can guarantee that small schools carved out of a larger one will work, but ensuring these four critical physical separations will go a long way towards creating schools that are separate in space, as well as concept.
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