By THOMAS LUCKIE III

OGDENSBURG -- Ogdensburg City School District Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment and Technology Kevin Kendall addressed the Board of Education regarding the district’s proposed plan to phase out multi-age classrooms at Monday’s meeting.

Kendall stated that the District Action Committee, comprised of teachers, parents, students, board members and administrators met in January to discuss the future of multi-age classrooms at John F. Kennedy and Grant C. Madill Elementary Schools.

The future of the multi-age classrooms was also discussed with participating teachers and each of the Site-Based Teams for the schools, according to Kendall.

The proposal plans to convert two multi-age classrooms at Kennedy that are currently split between first/second and third/fourth grades to traditional grade-level specific classrooms beginning with the arrival 2018-19 school year in September.

During the 2019-20 school year, the district plans to convert a fifth/sixth grade classroom at Kennedy and a first/second grade classroom at Madill to traditional grade-level specific classrooms.

“What we’ve done in the past with multi-age has been very successful, but what we feel is that we can still meet the demands of Next Generation Learning Standards by going in to traditional classrooms, instead of doing the multi-age model,” Kendall said.

Kendall also noted that one multi-age classroom teacher is slated for retirement at the end of the current school year and no teachers in the district seemed interested in making the move to multi-age from grade-specific classrooms.

“There’s very little training out there for multi-age models to send teachers to and when principals polled current staff to see who would be interested in filling those positions, we didn’t get anybody interested,” Kendall said.

The district plans to send out letters to parents and guardians with plans for the proposed phase out of multi-age classrooms, which Kendall provided to the board in the meeting’s agenda packet.

No formal action was required by the board regarding the proposal, as Kendall’s update was strictly informational in nature.