Beginning next school year, Brown County junior high and high school students will have fewer classes on their schedules, be in each class longer, and have more time built into the school day to get extra help.
At the Feb. 6 school board meeting, high school Principal Matt Stark and junior high Principal Brian Garman presented the plan to move to a trimester schedule. This means that the schools will operate on three, 12-week grading periods instead of the two, 18-week semesters currently.
After each 12-week trimester, junior high and high school students will receive a new schedule of classes. Core classes like math and English will still only take place over two trimesters, which will allows students to retake a course in an off trimester if they were to fail it.
Next school year, junior high and high school students will take five classes over each 12-week period. Each class period will be at least an hour long. Currently, classes last around 45 minutes, Stark said.
All classes will meet every day, and students will earn credits for each trimester of classes completed.
The times that the school day will start and end won’t change.
“Our real interest in this was gaining instructional time,” Garman said. “Our students come in our core subjects from BCI (the intermediate school) (where) in math and language arts, they get 90 minutes. Then they come here and get 45 minutes.
“If you look at that over the course of the year, it’s about 37-and-a-half days of instruction we can actually have students gain by doing that,” Garman said.
The schedule change also is happening to create more time in the school day for staff meetings related to implementing the TAP System for Teacher and Student Advancement. Last fall, Brown County Schools received a $5.5 million federal grant to support and provide additional training to the district’s teachers as they help students reach educational benchmarks.
Stark and counselor Donna Alwine attended a presentation at Bloomington South High School about its trimester schedule; another group visited another school that also has trimesters.
The new schedule is intended to lighten the class load for teachers, too, who are currently teaching six classes a day, or 12 over the course of a year. They will still teach 12 classes next school year, but it will be to four classes per trimester instead of six.
The new schedule also allows students to earn an additional credit each trimester. Currently, students can earn 14 credits each year; under a trimester they could earn 15. Students need different credit totals to earn certain types of diplomas.
Trimesters will give students the ability to take more electives, since four additional classes could be added over four years. Choir, drama, band and Eagle Manufacturing, will be available each trimester for high school students.
The junior high currently offers four elective slots, but some classes take up more than one slot. Switching to trimesters would give students room to take an extra elective, or to do an elective they love all year long.
“A lot of kids don’t want to take vocal music all year long, but they might be willing to take one or two trimesters. Then, (they) get interested in it and the following year, they want to take it all year long,” Garman said.
The junior high is a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) certified school, which means students are doing hands-on, project-based learning in their classes. The additional class time will help with that, too.
“You need that (extra) time because you just get barely get started with a project, and boom, it’s over. Even 14 extra minutes in the classroom makes a big difference when you’re creating engineering projects and things like that,” Garman said.
School leaders also believe that this change will reduce the stress on students. “This reduces that daily stress load because you’re not moving around nearly as much, you’re in classes for a longer period of time, and you have fewer classes you have to prepare for,” Stark said.
If a student were to fail a core class, like Algebra 1, during the first trimester, the new schedule would put that student back in Algebra 1 next trimester to retake the first portion of the course instead of doing credit recovery online. “In-classroom learning is always going to be better (than online),” Stark said.
The change also could help students take C4 career-oriented classes who otherwise couldn’t. Under the trimester system, students can earn nine credits from Brown County High School while also participating in C4. Currently, the maximum number of credits a student can earn while participating in C4 is six.
Dual-credit courses through Indiana University would be a trimester long under the new schedule. “In one of those (schedule) spots, a kid could take W131, L202 and speech class, then get nine hours of credit from IU for those three classes in their senior year,” Stark said.
Extra help
All high school students also will have a student resource time (SRT) class period built into their schedule, which they can use to take a test they missed or to visit a teacher to get additional help.
Currently, high school students have a 20-minute long advisory period that they can use to do those things.
Stark said the plan is to work with administration, team leaders, counselors and other staff to refine what SRT will look like next year and how it can be used to help kids who may be at risk of failing.
“An example would be if a student is not turning in their homework, that then triggers a support system during SRT,” Stark explained.
One possibility is for the guidance office to run a weekly report through Skyward to help identify students who need additional classroom help by looking at factors like unexcused absences, discipline referrals and seeing if homework has been turned in.
If students don’t need that time to catch up, maybe other activities will be available to them. SRT time could be used to just get extra time in a class to ensure they understand the content. Or Eagle Manufacturing students could potentially have more time to work during SRT. Students could use the time to work on college applications, or with groups on different projects.
“That becomes an incentive to say, ‘You’re saying if I get all of my homework done and I’ve got at least a C in the class, I have some other options that will be available to me?’ Yes, but if you don’t, that’s your first priority,” Stark said.
North and South Montgomery School corporations also use trimester systems. Both districts are similar in size to Brown County Schools. Stark said that those districts and Bloomington South have reported high graduation rates, more students in taking Advanced Placement courses and receiving passing rates on those exams, and fewer dropouts since implementing SRT as part of the trimester system.
“The trimester system itself is not the magic bullet that can solve all problems, but this structure, especially SRT, allows us to make those interventions immediate,” he said.
The junior high will not offer an SRT period to its students, because they want to be able to offer more electives.
“Students would have fewer electives to explore, and we just don’t want to do that for seventh- and eighth-graders. … I feel like elective courses are valuable. We don’t want to take time away from them,” Garman said.
The junior high will no longer have study halls next year. “We have high-quality teachers, they are highly trained and I think it’s a waste of their talents, and we want our kids exploring,” Garman said about that change. “Kids will be forced into exploring some type of a course.”
Students who have IEPs will still have their resource classes if they need them.
Garman believes going to six periods a day will overall provide more support in the classroom, including the availability of special education teachers to help in classrooms and paraprofessionals because there will be fewer classes to cover.
“We tried remediation and different things, but I think it’s time to try expanding the class periods, more interaction with our highly qualified language arts and math teachers with support,” Garman said.
Scheduling
Students were expected to start registering for classes this month. Stark reiterated to the board that each student would meet with their school counselor before finalizing their schedule.
Under the trimester schedule, there will still be conflicts with “singleton” classes, or classes that are only offered for one period. “That currently happens. That’s why we’re building this as a team. We can anticipate some of those bumps,” Stark said.
School board member Stephanie Kritzer said she had heard concerns from parents that seniors next year may not be able to take enough credits to complete diploma requirements under the trimester system.
“Under no circumstances are we going to be in a position where we wipe out a kid’s honors diploma. That is not even conceivable to me,” Stark said.
If “we found out a number of kids we’re going to lose an academic honors diploma or a Core 40 diploma, and we couldn’t figure out how to solve that, then we would blow this up and not do this,” Stark said. “We’re not going to do something that is going to wipe those out.”
Other changes
At the junior high, physical education and health classes will be integrated into one class next year. It will be offered each trimester with smaller class sizes. Integrating PE and health also will no longer require the junior high to use staff from other buildings to teach health.
Brown County Intermediate School and the elementary schools also will go to three, 12-week grading periods instead of the current four, nine-week periods to align with the high school and junior high.
“It was just a natural fit. We feel like there’s research behind that work anyway. It is very challenging to assess a kindergartner when you’ve only known them for nine weeks and they’re just learning what life is all about,” Superintendent Laura Hammack said.
“We get these babies in and it takes three or four weeks to get them going,” said Helmsburg Elementary School Principal Kelli Bruner.
Parent-teacher conferences will still happen each October at the schools.
