School District Utilization Study to Examine Middle School Re-organization

The Board of Education has commissioned JCJArchitecture of Hartford to do a District Wide Utilization Study. JCJ’s mandate is to address enrollment at Elementary Schools in Middletown, and to evaluate the wisdom of having the current configuration of the Middle Schools. JCJArchitecture specifically has been directed to consider the financial implications of any proposed recommendations.

In addition to the broad charge to make a district wide demographic study and to make re-districting recommendations to address overcrowding at some schools and a racial imbalance at one school, JCJ will assess various specific proposals for rearranging the utilization of Middletown Schools. They will study the educational and financial advantages, disadvantages, and feasibility of the following middle school configurations:

1. Making no changes, keeping one 6th grade only school (Keigwin) and one 7th and 8th grade school (Woodrow Wilson, now sited in the old High School).
2. Closing the 6th grade school, and combining the 6th grade with the 7th and 8th grades at Woodrow Wilson.
3. Returning the 120 Middletown students at Thomas Edison Middle School (a Meriden magnet school) to the District, in the context of option 1 or option 2, above.
4. Redistributing the 6th grades back to the 8 elementary schools.
5. Creating two middle schools to serve 6th, 7th, and 8th grade, using the two existing middle schools.

The Board of Ed expects that JCJ will get input from the public, from parents, and from the Board of Ed. This will occur at focus group sessions and evening meetings. In a January 26 letter to parents of school children and to school staff, JCJ went further and promised to also coordinate with School staff:

Our work will be coordinated with the Middletown Public Schools' administration, staff, and parent groups so that the final recommendations to be presented to the Board of Education will have been shaped by the input of these stakeholder groups. We look forward to our work in Middletown and to meeting with the students, teachers, administrators, parents, and residents as we undertake this important project.

At a January meeting of the Moody School PTA, assistant superintendent Barbara Senges told parents that JCJ would offer suggestions to solve the overcrowding problems at Moody. Those suggestions would be implemented before the next school year. Senges also said that the entire JCJ report would be finished before the "next budget cycle", suggesting that it would be done by December at the latest.

Schools superintendent Michael Frechette, in a February 19th letter to the Westfield Residents Association, confirmed part of this time line:

...JCJ Architecture anticipates having their teams in the schools and around town for the rest of this month [February]. Their outreach will start in March giving them enough time to inform the public and arrange for meeting places and working documents. The draft and final reports would follow in April and May. JCJ will be contacting Moody School (as well as all schools) to arrange for their team to meet with appropriate stakeholders.

At the March 17th Moody School PTA meeting, Principal Yolande Eldridge said that she had heard nothing from JCJ until that morning, when she received a draft of their plan for getting stakeholder input from Superintendent Frechette. She handed this draft of a "Middletown Public Schools Visioning" plan to PTA parents. The draft calls for meetings with interested parties to begin possibly as early as next week (dates will be in The Eye as soon as we know). Interested parties, as defined by the draft plan, include Board of Ed members, the Mayor, Council members, administrators, teachers, parents, and students. Mrs. Eldridge also confirmed that there has been no JCJ visit to Moody to assess the building's current status in advance of these proposed meetings.  

JCJ is a large architectural firm with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Phoenix, San Diego, and Hartford. They have done three projects in Middletown in recent years: the $8.1 million renovation and construction of Snow Elementary School, the $7.3 million construction of the Middletown Police Headquarters, and the construction and renovation of the Wesleyan Film Studies Building on Washington Terrace.