Chatham Rolls Out Its Plan For Future Grade Reconfiguration

CHATHAM, NJ — Chatham Superintendent Michael LaSusa has rolled out a potential plan to change grade configurations beginning with the 2025–26 school year, which would add an extra grade to the middle school.

The plan would be to separate fifth graders from the elementary level and place them within the middle school, making the new configuration: kindergarten to fourth; fifth to eighth; and the final four grades still in high school.

Last fall, LaSusa presented a potential plan to the board of education that would implement full-day kindergarten while also calling for a reconfiguration of the school district to help combat enrollment declines.

As a first step, Chatham Middle School administrators were trained on the Genesis scheduling system, which is a student information system used by the high school.

The Genesis system teaches administrators how to create master schedules that optimize space utilization, allowing the district to determine whether another grade level can be accommodated in the middle school.

Based on that work, LaSusa said that the middle school administrators were able to determine that there would be enough space at the middle school to incorporate 12 homerooms for the fifth graders.

"There is a pretty high level of confidence that, when these class levels move up into the middle school, they can accommodate the middle school. That's kind of the big takeaway," LaSusa said.

Some residents were concerned that the fifth-grade curriculum and instruction would change as a result of the move to the middle school. LaSusa clarified that there would be no changes to the curriculum and that fifth grade at Long Valley Middle School would continue to operate as usual.

"The goal would be to enable the fifth grade to have access to a greater number of opportunities in the form of electives or world languages and facilities," LaSusa said.

Stephanie Lukasiewicz, a Chatham Middle School teacher, thanked the board for keeping the public informed about the reconfiguration decision but also expressed concern on behalf of the faculty.

"There has been a lot of concern and questioning from our staff just because of how big this change is... We feel that real, authentic staff input is invaluable in this process to make it as smooth as possible for the students," Lukasiewicz said.

One note of concern was the potential reduction in "houses" within the middle school.

Chatham Middle School has always used a "house system," which groups students together within the school, according to LaSusa. In a class of 300 students, for example, there would be three houses of 100 students each. Those 100 students would attend class together and have the same teachers, LaSusa said.

Initially, the middle school had two houses but moved to three when enrollment was continuing to increase.

With the reconfiguration, the middle school would have to decide whether to return to two houses or remove the structure entirely and de-house.

"The administration feels pretty strongly that the better option is to de-house. De-housing means that there is a little more flexibility in keeping staff on board and therefore keeping sections or programs and class sizes where we want them," LaSusa said.

Lukasiewicz said that removing the common planning times that are in the house system could have an adverse effect on teachers because it will reduce the time that teachers have to coordinate and work with at-risk students.

The implementation of reconfiguration would skip two school years because, according to LaSusa, it would take some time to prepare for a change and provide more flexibility with enrollment numbers.