Marblehead School Officials Clarify New K-3 Education Plan

MARBLEHEAD, MA — Morning recess is back. But there are still many changes in store for Marblehead kindergartners through third-graders as administrators look to bring more consistency to the curriculum throughout the district.

In an extensive explanation of the new district-wide K-3 schedule during Thursday night's Marblehead School Committee meeting, Assistant Superintendent Nan Murphy sought to lay out the reasoning behind many of the changes, clear up "misconceptions" and explain why the changes will ultimately be beneficial to the district's youngest students.

"Everything around this schedule is teacher-forward and requires teacher autonomy," Murphy said. "It is a frame. And it's a frame we will use to ensure equity and access across all of our teaching and learning opportunities across our two elementary schools."

The new schedule coincides with the opening of the new Joseph & Lucretia Brown Elementary School opening on Oct. 13 and is an attempt to verify that the district meets the state's time-on-learning standards, dedicates enough time in the school day to each subject and eliminates the disparate practices that Superintendent John Buckey said were found in each elementary school during a review last year.

"When we asked for the schedule of each building at the elementary level we received individual classroom teacher schedules," he said. "When we inquired about the building schedule, we might then get a grade-level team's schedule. But it was different from the same grade level at a different school."

The state mandates that all students receive at least 900 hours of learning time each school year — which is 180 days of learning, five days per week, at five hours of dedicated learning time per day. Buckey said that while that was reasonably strained during the pandemic school year last year, "that we might not have been meeting it for years, and that nobody addressed it, was worthy of our review."

"It was clear there was not a school schedule that structured the learning time across our elementaries," Buckey said. "As such, some of the schools were meeting the learning time (requirements), and others were not. Understandably, this raised deeply troubling concerns around equity. A student's grade-level experience — kindergarten, first, second and third — should not be predicated on where he or she lives in the district.

"People would support that we need an equitable school system, in theory, but if that means a change for a school in the system we get some of the concerns that are currently being raised."

One of the concerns parents raised as word of the new schedule weaved its way through social media in recent days was the elimination of morning recess. Murphy said the initial analysis showed a 40-minute dedicated recess was "excessive" when teachers had the ability to take a class outside for learning anytime they wanted, but the unstructured recess block was added back into the final schedule.

The other additions include a health and wellness block and an end-of-day WIN (What I Need) block that Murphy termed a "remediation and enlightenment" block, as well as more structured time for teacher collaboration.

Murphy said some concerns voiced that the final block of the day would be mostly screen-based learning were unfounded.

"Technology has run as much of a course as it can," Murphy said. "It provided us with wonderful opportunities (during remote and hybrid learning last year). But now we want to get back to the heart of teaching, And hands-on communication. And person-to-person communication."

Buckey said his request is to "pilot" the new schedule in the first trimester and then solicit feedback from a working group of parents, teachers, administrators, directors and specialists to review it. He proposed a forum at each school to get feedback on students' experiences in the first trimester and make "any optimizations deemed necessary once we have operated in the model for several weeks."

Buckey began the presentation by apologizing for the lack of communication and context with how word of the revamped schedule and impressions of it initially circulated.

"Aligning systems and implementing structures is hard work and it is messy," Buckey allowed. "The work was made messier and harder because I launched it so poorly. And, again, I own that.

"The schedule is a framework, not a box. Teachers have the autonomy to use the framework to provide time to teach each content area while having the flexibility to do what they have always done — read the classroom, and know when to press forward and when to pause.

"Nobody expects the framework to be times of rigidly held minutes when students sit at their desks and are expected to listen or work. Differentiation is a big part of success in elementary classrooms and our teachers are masters at this."

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(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)