Fewer teachers means more U46 multi-grade classrooms

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

ELGIN — Fireplace. Scarecrow. Abrelatas.

The students in Graciela Rios’ bilingual class at Lowrie Elementary School in Elgin worked together to list compound words. Some even flipped through the books stacked at their desks, grouped in five clusters of four or five around the classroom, looking for examples.

Suddenly, it clicked for first-grade student Marco Guevara.

“Spiderman,” Marco shouted. “Es ‘spider’ y ‘man!’”

The teacher added “superhero” to the list.

And she explained the groupings of desks around the room: First-grader Marco can learn from the second-graders in his group. The second-graders not only can share what they’ve learned but also sometimes benefit from the review of a concept they really didn’t get.

“I put the low kids and the high kids together. That way they can share,” Rios said. “They can learn from each other.”

In any classroom at any school, there are some students who perform at a higher level and some at a lower level than most of the students in the class. In Rios’ classroom, there are students at different grade levels.

Multi-grade classrooms aren’t new — think one-room schoolhouse — and they aren’t all that uncommon in Elgin School District U46, according to district officials. But there are more multi-grade classrooms this year than in years past, mostly because more than 400 teachers were laid off in last year’s budget cuts.

This year, U46 elementary schools have 689 single-grade classrooms and 177 multi-grade classrooms, according to Deborah Devine, the district math instructional coach, who also has coached the district’s multi-grade classroom teachers for the last five years. That’s more than 20 percent of the Elgin school district’s elementary classrooms — about a 4 percent jump from the number of multi-grade classrooms (158 of 979 elementary classrooms) in the district last year.

Of those multi-grade classrooms, Devine said 82 are general education, compared to 69 last year, and 64 are bilingual, compared to 44 last year. (Other classrooms include dual language and special education students.) Most are in grades four to six, she added.

That jump is tied to the teacher layoffs that U46 made to make up for delayed and reduced funding from the state of Illinois before the current school year began. That left the same number of students with fewer teachers — and that could have meant huge class sizes.

“Increasing the class sizes caused the numbers to skew, and that caused the multi-grade numbers to rise,” Devine said.

“It is a numbers situation, so you don’t have a class of 32 in third grade and at fourth grade, you have 14. It’s based on numbers, and really the bilingual program is most impacted.”

Many bilingual classrooms combine later as students become proficient in English and transition into general education classes, she said.

Combining those classes has caused some concern from parents and some challenges for teachers, admitted Lisa Naccarato, who teaches a fourth/fifth-grade classroom at Horizon Elementary School in Hanover Park.

But, Naccarato said, “I’ve had great responses from parents. I think the fear comes from not knowing how the curriculum is taught. Once they sit in on an open house and find out how you teach it and the kids will get everything they would get (in a single-grade classroom), they’ve been very supportive, at least in my classroom.”

Many lessons, such as Rios’ lesson on compound words, can be taught to both grade levels in a multi-grade classroom, officials said. Often, it’s just a difference of their familiarity with the topic — whether it’s review for second-graders or new material for first.

Afterward, the students in Rios’ class broke into different groups, this time grouped by their reading abilities.

Each group met with the teacher at the back of the classroom to practice reading aloud — one group, a story about animals on a farm; another, first-grader Marlene Molina of Elgin bragged, a “real book” about the different ways birds use their beaks. Meantime, their classmates read independently, sprawled across the classroom, until it was their group’s turn.

Other subjects, such as math or social studies, can be more difficult to teach because the curriculums are so different, This year, the district introduced a new science curriculum for multi-grade classrooms, Naccarato said, but in a subject such as social studies, her fourth-graders are learning about different regions of the United States, while those in fifth grade are starting U.S. history.

During math, the fourth-grade “juniors” and fifth-grade “seniors” in her class sat at different workstations around her classroom. Some worked on writing out note cards for a science test later that week. A small group sat up front, grouped around her desk, where she led them through a worksheet on maximums, minimums, medians and modes on an overhead projector.

It can be a challenge for teachers to plan two different lessons for those subjects, Naccarato said.

Devine said providing support and training for those teachers has become especially important this year, as more multi-grade classrooms means more teachers are teaching to two grades for the first time. She led two weeks of training in a model multi-grade classroom this summer and spent the first couple weeks of the school year visiting classrooms and answering teacher questions.

With that planning up front, Naccarato said, “I don’t really think the kids notice it in the classroom. ... The kids get to socialize and meet with kids they normally wouldn’t. They get to be role models.”

Alyssa Caiafa of Bartlett, a fifth-grader in her class, said she was in a multi-grade classroom in third grade, too. And that was one of the things she liked most about it.

“You get to meet different grade levels,” Alyssa said.

And, Rios added, in a lot of ways, teachers don’t notice the difference between teaching a single- or multi-grade classroom. After all, she said, “I’m not teaching (grades) one and two. I teach kids.”

“I give each student what they need.”