Jefferson County – The first day of school was particularly stressful for sixth-graders at Falcon Bluffs Middle School on Monday.
There were fears about changing classes, reporting to multiple teachers and that “the eighth-graders are going to pick on us,” said 11-year-old Alycia Trujillo, a lanky sixth-grader.
At Falcon Bluffs, new sixth-grader Niki Brewer said Monday, “We’re experimental hamsters.”
In a sense, they are.
Unlike most other sixth-graders across the district, these students were entering a middle school, not an elementary school.
Falcon Bluffs Middle School, which opened two years ago to seventh- and eighth-graders, opened for the first time this year to sixth-graders. It is only the third middle school in the county to do so in about a decade.
The change comes three years after parents and other community members resisted a district proposal to convert all the elementary and middle schools that feed into Chatfield High. Only at crowded Shaffer Elementary School did parents agree to allow their sixth-graders to go on to Falcon Bluffs.
Falcon Bluffs had been on the verge of opening and the district proposal called for changing Bradford, Coronado, Mortensen, Ute Meadows, Stony Creek and Shaffer elementary schools, which fed into Falcon Bluffs and Deer Creek, into kindergarten-through-fifth-grade structures.
Deer Creek and Falcon Bluffs would absorb the sixth-graders and become sixth-through-eighth-grade structures. Both feed into Chatfield High School.
“There was a lot of vocal resistance,” said Wendy Rubin, principal at Falcon Bluffs. “A lot of what we heard was, ‘Too much, too soon. Eighth-graders will make them older. … Preserve their childhood for one more year.”‘
The areawide plan was eventually abandoned because, “overall, there was not enough support in the community to move all the kids,” Superintendent Cindy Stevenson said.
Rosie Merelli, a Shaffer parent at the time, said she wanted her daughter to have the opportunities that the middle school offered.
Students can enroll in band or orchestra classes every day, study languages or use computer software designed for engineering and architecture.
“The biggest attribute is being in a building where the entire building is dedicated to the needs of the early adolescent,” said Anne Sterrett, principal at Shaffer Elementary. “Early adolescents are half-child, half-adult. At any moment you may see both or neither.”
Two Jefferson County middle schools – West Jefferson and Evergreen – have had sixth-through-eighth designs for about a decade. Fifteen other neighborhood middle schools house only grades seven and eight.
The sixth-through-eighth model is common. The Cherry Creek School District has nine sixth-through-eighth middle schools, and the Aurora School District has seven.
Denver has 17 middle schools, 16 with a sixth-through-eighth structure.
Staff writer Karen Rouse can be reached at 303-820-1684 or krouse@denverpost.com.
