School to try smaller classes

By ROBERT KING

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 16, 2000

BROOKSVILLE -- When Dave Dannemiller took over as Pine Grove Elementary's principal in June 1999, he said he would make no big changes until he had spent a year on the job.

Now the changes are coming.

Dannemiller is shifting teachers and reworking the school's daily schedule in three grades next year to give students more time in smaller classroom settings.

Normally packed with 32 children, fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms will be reduced to 16 students for up to 90 minutes. First-grade classes, which normally have 20 children, will be cut to 10.

"If you make the class size small enough, you can change the method of instruction," Dannemiller said. By that, he means more time for teachers to give kids one-on-one attention, and more time in small groups of five to eight students.

In larger settings, teachers try to steal moments for a struggling child while being ever mindful of the activities elsewhere in the classroom. Frequently, they pull six or eight kids aside. But that still leaves another 25 or so to occupy themselves with desk work. If the overall numbers are cut to 10 or 15 students, classroom distractions are diminished.

Pine Grove hopes to pull off this feat through some scheduling magic and the addition of three "extension" teachers, one assigned to each of the affected grades.

The extension teachers will not have homerooms. Instead, their full-size classes will form when two homeroom teachers donate half of their children to a 45-minute combined session with the extension teacher. The two homeroom teachers are left with half a class, which makes for an intimate learning setting. Roles reverse later in the day so the children who first visited the extension teacher can enjoy the small class setting.

Devoting three teachers to "extension" roles will cost Pine Grove about $120,000. The money comes from part of the school's $630,000 Title I grant -- federal money aimed at schools with large numbers of low-income children.

The smaller classes cover only half the student body for just one-third of the day. But Dannemiller says the extension time will be "more productive and more efficient" because students will be split into their groups based on achievement levels.

Higher-performing children will get more time in a classroom where teachers can cover more complex topics. Lower-performing students will get the attention they need to catch up.

"It's going to be a major change in these three grade levels," said Denise Ressel, who will be the fourth-grade extension teacher. "Our goal is to give the homeroom teacher more one-on-one time to teach on their (students') level."

Dannemiller picked up the idea in the fall at a conference for elementary educators. Later, he took some of his staff to see the strategy at a school near Jacksonville.

Money constraints prevented him from using extension teachers in grades two and three.

The grades he picked were chosen for strategic purposes.

Fourth- and fifth-graders are the focus of the high-stakes Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. The small class time will key in on areas where Pine Grove struggled last year -- using math to solve real-life problems and in reading for information.

First-graders were chosen for small-class sessions to help them learn to read, a skill they're supposed to pick up before moving to second grade.

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