SUSD to create multi-age program at Brook Haven

It’s official: Pine Crest students and the multi-age program
currently used at their elementary school will be moved onto the
Brook Haven campus at the beginning of the next school year.
Sebastopol Union School District trustees at their last board
meeting voted in favor of the merge that will turn Brook Haven —
currently serving sixth-through-eighth-grade students — into a K-8
school, with combo classrooms at the lower grade levels.
The Multi-Age Education program moving with Pine Crest has every
student in either a kindergarten through second grade class, or a
third through fifth grade class. Some parents at a recent community
forum voiced as much concern over the possibility of losing the
multi-age program, as they did the slated closure of the elementary
school.
With the biggest decisions out of the way, Superintendent/Pine
Crest Principal Liz Schott said following winter break she will
solicit members for a “transition committee” to help work out the
rest of the details. “My vision is the committee will be comprised
of parents, staff, community members and possibly an older student
or two who will meet to co-create the Brook Haven K-8 school,” she
said. “We are not intending to invent any wheels around a K-8
school; we will be visiting other K-8 schools to see how they are
scheduled,” she said.
Several parents at the forum also said they were worried about
their young children sharing a campus with middle school
students.
However, the play areas for the younger students will be
completely separate from the older students, or the same yards
might be used at different times. The older children will also have
different lunch schedules than the younger children, Schott said.
“I don’t see kindergarteners and eighth-graders interacting
unsupervised,” she said.
What she does see already at other schools, and is excited about
seeing at Brook Haven next year, is older students helping in the
classrooms of younger students. School assemblies would also
include the whole school, she said.
Pine Crest students clapped and cheered at one of their
assemblies when Schott told them they were going to take the
multi-age program with them when they moved to Brook Haven. 
“Kids always just want to be bigger than they are and this is a
way of doing that,” Schott said. “I also asked them how many knew
someone at Brook Haven and 90 percent raised their hands,” she
said, noting this is largely due to the multi-age program.
Trustees at their last meeting also voted to consolidate Park
Side – the district’s other elementary school – on its lower campus
and asked Schott to present them at the January meeting with
alternatives for generating revenues on the upper campus at Park
Side, where modular classrooms currently house the
kindergartners. 
The SUSD board in November voted unanimously to close Pine Crest
as a result of financial hardship and declining enrollment. The
district faces a $500,000 shortfall in the upcoming year – which
promises to get worse in the near future – and has seen declining
enrollments for the past 15 years with a student population that
has dropped from more than 1,400 students in the mid-1990s to
slightly more than 700 today.