School board to consider fewer 7-8 teachers, bigger classes for next fall

February 17, 2021  |  By Lisa Scagliotti 

The Harwood Unified Union School Board tonight expects to continue its discussion about renaming Thatcher Brook Primary School in Waterbury and it also plans to act on a proposal that would cut four teachers from Harwood Union Middle School for the 2021-22 school year. 

The board last week voted 13-0 in favor of finding a new name for Thatcher Brook school after historical background about the school’s 18th-century namesake, Partridge Thatcher, being a slaveholder was brought to light in the community. 

A native of Connecticut, Thatcher was an early landowner in Waterbury who spent time surveying the town after which a brook was named for him. The school adopted the name in 1997 when Waterbury and Duxbury merged their elementary schools resulting in the primary school in Waterbury and the middle school in Duxbury, both named for nearby brooks.

The board is looking to outline a process by which a new name will be determined over the coming months. Board leaders have shared an example of a school renaming in Brookline, Mass. for tonight’s discussion. 

The board expects to spend time over its next several meetings determining how to proceed on the school naming question with a goal of involving the community, students and staff. 

Proposal for fewer 7-8 teachers, bigger classes 

A more immediate item for tonight's discussion and possible action is a proposal to regroup students into larger classes at Harwood Union Middle School by eliminating four of the school’s eight core teachers.

The suggestion to reduce the configuration by one learning team is based on enrollment projections for seventh and eighth grades at both Harwood Middle School and Crossett Brook Middle School for next fall.

Both schools have two teams of seventh- and eighth-grade students presently, each with four core teachers. 

Enrollment projections show that class size at Harwood Middle School would be about 15 students per class in the fall and Crossett Brook would have 18 students. 

But the school district also has requests from families of 17 seventh graders who normally would be headed to Harwood Middle School to instead attend Crossett Brook under the district’s school-choice policy.

Harwood Middle School serves students in grades seven and eight from the district’s communities in Mad River Valley -- Moretown, Waitsfield, Warren and Fayston -- while students from Waterbury and Duxbury in grades five through eight attend Crossett Brook. 

If the 17 students are added to Crossett Brook in the fall, class sizes there would increase to 20 students per class. 

The resulting class size at Harwood Middle would be 13.75 students per class with the current two-team configuration that relies on eight teachers. If four Harwood Middle School teachers are cut and students are arranged into one team with four teachers, the class size would be 25.5 students per class. 

In their memo to the board ahead of tonight’s meeting, board Chair Caitlin Hollister and Vice Chair Torrey Smith said their aim was to discuss this potential move separate from budget discussions which just wrapped up in January. The board had proposed a $40 million budget that voters will consider in the upcoming Town Meeting Day election. That budget includes the current staffing at Harwood Middle School. 

The proposal up for discussion tonight does not outline the budget impact of reducing the four teacher positions.

Taking this up tonight also puts the discussion ahead of teacher contract decisions for next year which are typically finalized in the spring. Teachers association president Steve Rand, a Harwood Union High School teacher, said the union is aware of the recommendation but did not have any comment on it yet. 

A single middle school on the horizon 

The move comes as big-picture discussions continue regarding the ultimate consolidation of the district’s two middle schools. A committee of the school board is charged with working on a proposal that would ultimately combine middle school students from Harwood to Crossett and possibly other students in the district at the Crossett Brook campus. 

Crossett was designed for students from Duxbury and Waterbury but a growing number of students from the district’s other communities have taken advantage of the district’s choice policy to attend there in recent years, contributing to a difference in seventh and eighth grade enrollment between the two schools.   

According to enrollment data, in the 2018-19 school year, the number of seventh and eighth graders was pretty evenly split with 136 at Crossett and 135 at Harwood; in 2019-20 Crossett had 162, and Harwood had 119; this year the split is 154-107. The projected enrollment with the transfer requests to Crossett Brook for next fall would have 160 seventh and eighth graders at Crossett and 102 at Harwood. 

In 2020, the school board sought to combine all of Harwood Middle School’s students along with Moretown Elementary School’s fifth and sixth graders at Crossett Brook Middle School. The new configuration was outlined in the budget proposed to voters in March whereby temporary classroom units would have been needed to accommodate the increased enrollment at Crossett Brook until voters could approve a construction bond to expand the school. 

Voters rejected the budget last  March. The subsequent budget that voters adopted in June -- after the COVID-19 pandemic hit -- did not rely on moving any students for the 2020-21 school year. 

Currently, students in grades 7-12 are only allowed to attend school two days a week under the hybrid learning model in place to address COVID-19 public health guidance. School administrators have said that classroom space is limiting in-person instruction in order for the schools to meet state requirements for students and teachers to maintain 6 feet of distance from others. It’s not clear yet what the circumstances regarding the pandemic will be in the fall and whether distancing will still be a factor. 

Tonight’s meeting is the board’s final session before the March 2 Town Meeting Day election in which voters will decide seven of the board’s 14 members. 

The school board meets at 6 p.m. using Zoom video conference. Meetings also are live streamed by Mad River TV and on the district’s YouTube Channel. Meeting agendas, background information and links to each of these online sources are on the school district’s website under the Board heading at huusd.org/huusd-board.