Reply to What can a K-8 do to Keep Students through 8th?

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[quote=Anonymous]I think about this a lot. We are not in DC/VA anymore. Our school used to be a place people scrambled to apply to in 3s preschool or K because they really wanted to secure those seats to have all the way through middle school. Our city grew rapidly just before the pandemic and put a ton of pressure on HS admissions. A decade ago, kids from certain schools could go to any HS they wanted to with the right grades and activities. Now, 5-12, 6-12 and 9-12 privates have expanded their geographic reach and our population has grown. Everyone thinks hard about jumping ship in 5th grade for fear of the 9th grade admissions lottery.

What could schools do to aid retention?

Offer tons of special programs in middle school to make up for its downsides:

Hands-on projects, travel programs, local field trips to unique destinations, and close connections and interactions with community members and local industries would make a huge difference. Get the kids away from cliquey or dysfunctional friend groups and the same toxic social patterns that recur in a small environment. Get them mixing with outsiders and multi-age groups in a structured way, and keep them busy.

Our school is constantly having the conversation about how to make the middle school grades more desirable, but the unstated problem is social. Middle school grades lose the “good” kids and they fill up with kids moving from public or from other cities, but also kids who really struggled socially at their current schools and couldn’t get into a “better” 5-12 or 6-12 school. The middle school social groups often end up dominated by left-behind kids who wanted to leave but couldn’t because they are not smart/sufficiently motivated, and new, merely quirky or flat-out difficult kids who couldn’t find their social scene at other schools. And then the cycle continues because families can’t see their kids among those middle school groups and they flee.[/quote]

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