St. Michael Catholic School Thrives with Middle Level

When the community's oldest building for learning announced it would be expanding to include seventh and eighth grade over the next two years, one question permiated through the community.

"Where the heck are they gonna put them?"

Adding 26 seventh graders to created a bit of a crunch, but, more than anything, it's created change in the city's educational mainstay, as the Catholic school has changed the way it does business.

Normally run as a K-6 institution, the school was content with the one teacher, one classroom approach. In that sense, it was, at heart, an elementary school. Students at the upper levels did learn civics and other subjects that are introduced in the middle levels, but kids didn't move from room to room.

They do now.

"It's a total transition. We spent a lot of time identifying what we wanted to achieve with our students, and how to give the kids in grades five through seven–which we came to call our middle level–the optimal learning experience," said Jennifer Haller.

The result is almost a "school within a school" approach. Students in grades K-4 are still learning via that elementary model. But students in grades five, six and seven are operating very much as they would at their public counterparts.

There's a separate administrator, with Melissa Schlafke serving as the middle level dean of students. There are teachers dedicated to subjects such as math, science and language. And there's even a very cool "ST.MCS" sweatshirt designed just for the pre-teen crowd.

"It really, for them and for us, feels like a middle level school. I think some of us were unsure how this would all play out. The idea of change is always really difficult to handle sometimes. But I think the way we've handled it, and the way the kids were able to get involved, it's given us a lot of freedom to create this new model that we can use going forward," Schlafke said.

Angle Cina, who teaches math to the fifth through seventh-graders, agreed.

"We're finding little things that come up every day that we either need to change or are really excited to embrace," she said.

One of the new ideas was "GOD Time." At the beginning of each day, students in the middle level are sent to a "homeroom of sorts." No matter what grade, they join together for prayer and announcements. GOD, which stands for "Gathering of Disciples," was named by a middle level student.

"I think that's such an exciting part of the school is the amount of effort people have put in, including our students, to make this a success fromt the beginning," Haller said.

"It's really neat to see where we've come from, and where we are going to go," Cina said.