In 1963, the District 96 Intermediate School got the name it bears today?”L.J. Hauser Junior High School?”after the district’s second superintendent. Since that time, Hauser has operated as a classic junior high school, with students changing classrooms as many as nine times a day in anticipation of the day they graduate and enroll in high school.

It’s a model that has served Riverside and Brookfield students well for decades, but junior high schools are becoming increasingly rare in Illinois, with more and more schools favoring a middle school model, which emphasizes an interdisciplinary, team teaching approach and more personalized guidance for students.

The middle school model has become so established that the Illinois State Board of Education requires all teachers who teach grades six through eight to be certified in the middle school philosophy.

It also a model that new District 96 Superintendent Jonathan Lamberson favors.

“I’m biased; I think it’s appropriate for me to acknowledge that,” Lamberson said. “My background is in curriculum development in middle schools and high schools.”

And though Lamberson said that there’s no plan to change Hauser Junior High into a middle school?””I’m not convinced a change needs to be made,” he said?”the District 96 school board’s Education Committee in January approved the formation of an ad hoc group to study the possibility of changing Hauser to a middle school.

According to Lamberson, the group will include 10 PTA representatives, four faculty members, two students and two administrators. The District 96 administrators on the group are current interim Hauser Principal Victoria DeVylder and Central School Principal Janice Limperis.

Limperis, hired last year from Lake Forest School District 67, was principal at Deerpath Middle School and was on board in 2000 when Deerpath changed its academic model from junior high to middle school.

“I think one of the key things is to involve all parties in the decision,” Limperis said. “We haven’t determined a direction yet. It has to work for our kids and families.”

Lamberson said that the Middle School Study Group will research the possibility of moving the district toward a middle school model, with the hope that the group will make a recommendation to the Board of Education by November or December of 2006.

If the board decides to implement a middle school model, the earliest that would take place would be for the 2007-08 school year. At that, the model could possibly be implemented in phases.

“If the board says next winter that it’s a green light, we’d have to help the teachers, [do] staff development and determine what this looks like,” Lamberson said. “We’d have a lot of work to do in planning. That’s why we’re hoping no later than the end of 2006 to decide if it’s right or not.”

Board member Nancy Jensen, who is chair of the board’s Education Committee said the study group was “not just an exercise we’re going through to make appearances.”

Rather, Jensen said, “I don’t think we’re perfect, so I don’t see why we can’t look at ways to do things better.”

What’s a middle school?

There are many differences between the ways middle schools and junior highs work, but the most obvious difference is the way the schools are organized. While junior high teachers generally work independently from one another and teach students from all grade levels every day, middle schools emphasize teacher collaboration and an interdisciplinary approach.

“There is a set time where every teacher who works together plans together,” Lamberson said. “In a junior high, there’s never common planning and never time to come together to talk about multi-disciplinary topics.”

In addition, those common planning sessions allow teachers to talk about student development issues in addition to curriculum, Lamberson said.

“In a middle school, this is critical,” he said. “Middle school kids never want to give any indication that anything is wrong. This is where adults have the greatest opportunity to help students.”

Instruction also follows a flexible planning schedule, sometimes referred to as block scheduling, in order to provide a greater depth of instruction. Instead of nine 42-minutes periods, the school day may be made up of four or five 80-minute periods, and students may not have the same classes every day of the week.

“The quality of the interaction and experience typically improves exponentially for both teachers and students,” Lamberson said.

Another hallmark of middle schools is an advisory program in which each student is assigned a faculty member who serves as a point person throughout their time at the school. Currently, Hauser Junior High has one counselor serving 429 students. In the middle school model, the counselor “helps the advisors advise,” Lamberson said.

A third key difference in the middle school model is a greater emphasis on elective “exploratory” classes and greater inclusiveness in such programs as athletics. For example, Lamberson said, band would be an exploratory taught during the day instead of outside school hours. And students wouldn’t be cut from sports team, he said; rather, the junior high would create more teams to accommodate the students.

“Hauser works very hard at that already, but in some sports there are cuts,” Lamberson said. “If you have a sixth-grader who’s cut from girls volleyball, that kid will probably never go out for a sport again. [In a middle school] if kids want to participate, they can participate.”

One of the complaints about some middle schools is that while they nurture students, they don’t prepare them for the high school experience, which the junior high more closely resembles. Lamberson said the best middle schools provide for a transition in eighth-grade that bridges that gap.

“The best middle schools develop a middle school philosophy for grades six and seven, and then a bridge philosophy that’s more akin to a junior high in eighth grade,” Lamberson said. “So when students finish school, they know what it’s like to be successful in a high school environment.”