It's a squirrelly, worrisome time, those middle years between the childhood security of elementary school and the teenage liberation of high school. Boys' limbs lengthen and girls' angles turn to curves seemingly overnight. Friendships form and dissolve with lighting speed. New subjects at school -- what's algebra? -- loom large.

GREAT BEGINNINGS Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette

Gabrielle Mason, 12, will be attending sixth grade at Milliones Elementary School this term. Graphic: Middle school vs. K-8 About the series The opening of school each year brings new hope for a fresh start. This back-to-school series focuses on students -- from kindergarten through college -- who are starting the school year with dreams and challenges that face students everywhere. Day One: Transitions smoother now for kindergartners Tomorrow: A student chooses an area vocational-technical high school.

Now, as children head back to classes, more middle school-age students will be returning to the familiar world of their elementary schools instead of tackling what is often the bigger, rougher realm of a traditional middle school. In a trend that is picking up steam across the nation and in Pittsburgh Public Schools, many school districts are keeping students in elementary schools from kindergarten through eighth grade rather than sending them to a separate school for sixth through eighth grade.

Supporters of those mainstream middle schools say they offer more advantages, such as expanded electives and more advisers. Advocates of so-called K-8 schools, however, say such schools give children 10 to 14 years old a familiar, stable setting at a time when many other things in their lives, from their bodies to their relationships with their parents and peers, are changing dramatically.

"It's hard for them to adjust to a lot of change," said Jameikka Miller, a Pittsburgh Public Schools parent whose son, Rodney, plans to return to Burgwin Elementary School in Hazelwood for sixth grade on Thursday. "They're used to each other [at a K-8], so there's more stability."

But Toinette Mason, whose daughter, Gabrielle, will attend Milliones Middle School in the Hill District this fall, thinks her daughter needs to be treated not as the child she was but as the teenager she's about to become.

"Every time I turned around, she was in trouble because they weren't strict enough for her" at Burgwin, where Gabrielle attended fifth grade with Rodney. "Milliones won't play with her."

The diverging paths of students such as Gabrielle and Rodney are becoming an increasing part of the conversations of parents, teachers and school administrators as school districts and families grow frustrated with many middle schools' stagnant test scores and students' unruly behavior.

In Pittsburgh, 11 elementary schools -- Arlington, Burgwin, Carmalt, Colfax, Greenfield, Homewood Montessori, Martin Luther King Jr., Mifflin, Morningside, Murray and Sunnyside -- have become K-8s in recent years, often after some powerful lobbying by parents who didn't want their children to leave a neighborhood school to take a bus to a far- off, unfamiliar middle school whose performance they questioned.

	Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette Rodney Miller, 11, will be staying at Burgwin Elementary school for sixth grade.

And parents of children at still more elementaries, such as Miller African Centered Academy in the Hill District, are pushing to follow their lead. Of the 2,362 sixth-graders expected to enroll this fall, 435 attend K-8 elementary schools.

"Parents sometimes think if 'I can just get my child back in the neighborhood for a few more years, they'll be safer,' " said C. Kenneth McEwin, coordinator of the middle grades teacher preparation program at Appalachian State University.

However popular K-8 schools might be with parents, they are not necessarily the "silver bullet" that some school officials and parents are looking for, according to McEwin and other experts.

In Pittsburgh, for instance, Homewood Montessori School's eighth-graders outperformed those in the rest of the district's eighth grades -- including students in some of the district's most popular and highest-scoring magnet middle schools -- on state math and reading tests last year. But Morningside Elementary's eighth-graders had the district's worst eighth-grade math scores and some of its worst reading scores.

"Some districts are simply moving young adolescents from middle schools to elementary schools, as if that would solve the problem," McEwin said. "The focus should not be on the grade configuration, but on the programs and practices that are effective."

Research, he said, shows that young adolescents learn more and score higher on tests if they have been taught by teams of teachers who plan lessons together and who show students the connections between related information and theories. Middle schools, which tend to be larger in size than K-8 schools, also offer students more chances to explore subjects such as band and foreign languages that the smaller K-8 schools can't always offer, according to McEwin.

And by sixth grade, many students like Gabrielle are ready for a change of scene.

"I'm just a little nervous that I might not know my way around the school, but I feel OK," Gabrielle said. "I'm from the Hill, so I'm not really nervous because I know everybody there."

A small school, however, offers something that many large comprehensive middle schools tend to lack: close personal relationships with teachers who can help guide young teenagers through a turbulent time, according to David Hough, director of the Institute for School Improvement at Southwest Missouri State University.

Every time a student changes schools, he said, research shows a dip in his performance and behavior at school, so staying at the same school can provide greater support for grades and attitude, especially for low-income and other at-risk children.

And although there might be fewer teachers to work in teams, K-8 teachers tend to work in teams more readily than middle-school teachers, who specialize in one subject and tend to focus their teaching on that topic.

In addition, parents like their children to attend the local school down the street, which makes them more supportive of their children at a time when many parents otherwise become less involved in school life, he said.

"The fact that they like the school tends to make them more supportive, and when you're more supportive, you tend to be more involved, and when you're more involved, kids tend to do better," Hough said.

When K-8s use approaches that have been proven successful, such as small classes, team teaching, older students tutoring younger students and teacher certification specifically for middle school education, they tend to do better than middle schools using the same approaches, both in suburban and urban districts, Hough said.

That's what Philadelphia schools' chief executive officer Paul Vallas found after he began phasing in K-8 schools in 2003, and phasing out middle schools, which the district plans to turn into small high schools.

The district, which had 42 middle schools in 2002, plans to have replaced all but eight of those with sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade classes at 130 K-8 schools by 2009.

Parents can't wait for the overhaul, Vallas said, and have been lobbying the district to speed the process.

Last year, more sixth-graders in the district's K-8 schools than in its middle schools scored at or above national averages in reading and math. The number of assaults on teachers was lower in K-8s as well, according to Vallas.

Both benefits, he said, stem partly from K-8 students' familiarity with their environment, including their teachers, which allows them to worry less about establishing a place for themselves in the school and focus more on their class work.

Students also tend to work harder and behave better because they know they are setting an example for the younger children in school, Vallas said.

"You have the opportunity to become the big kids on campus, the eighth-graders, the student leaders," Vallas said. "It almost creates an environment more conducive to maturity because as older kids, you're almost de facto given greater responsibility."

Rodney Miller, 11, says he feels a need to live up to that responsibility at Burgwin, where his three younger siblings will go to school this fall.

Other young children, from the kindergartners he helped teach last year as a fifth-grader to the little kids he passes in the hallway, look up to him, too. And this fall, he'll be an even bigger man on campus.

"I know a lot of little kids who say, 'I want to be just like Rodney,' " he said.

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Correction/Clarification: (Published Auig. 31, 2005) This story as originally in Monday's editions on middle schools gave the first name of Toinette Mason, the mother of Gabrielle Mason, a city school sixth grader, incorrectly.