Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Sixth-grader Hyea Jin Kim, right, chases eighth-grader Shawn McAtee while playing football as sixth-graders Kevin Silvo, far left, and David Bruzdewicz, far right, share recess at Greenfield Elementary School. Greenfield Elementary has grades kindergarten through eighth grade. Click photo for larger image. Previous story: All-in-one plan for reforming underachieving schools (06/11/06)

The eighth-grader asked Greenfield K-8 school Principal Brent Johnson to autograph a blank page in her yearbook.

Mr. Johnson instead flipped to the page with his own picture and found his face altered and an unkind remark, "no neck," written there.

The girl, embarrassed, skittered away. The episode didn't faze Mr. Johnson, who had been pilloried in yearbooks before.

"I get devil horns and missing teeth," the former Marine said.

School officials nationwide long have debated the best way to educate middle-grade pupils, 10- to 15-year-olds who act out and goof off during a period of rapid intellectual and physical development.

"It's like 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' when they hit sixth grade," Greenfield Assistant Principal Gina Robinson said.

In a growing number of school districts, including Pittsburgh, the large middle school, serving sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders, has lost popularity after decades of dominance. The city district closed seven middle schools June 14 and is expanding 10 elementary schools to take in middle-grade pupils, hoping the culture of an elementary building will improve academic performance and discipline.

The move will leave the district with 10 middle schools, six of them magnets, and increase the number of K-8 schools from 10 to 20.

To make the most of the shift, which has become an important part of Superintendent Mark Roosevelt's turnaround agenda, the district kicks off a three-day "K-8 summit" tomorrow at the Holiday Inn Select in Oakland. Major urban districts have been invited to send representatives to confer with their counterparts in Pittsburgh.

Greenfield a model

City school officials would like all of the new K-8 schools to perform as well as Greenfield, which last year beat the district average in standardized math and reading tests. The school met federal performance standards and received a 4, the top score given last year, in a Rand Corp. study of school performance.

"The school has a feel to it. ... Everybody's on the same page," said Mr. Johnson, who retires Friday after nearly 30 years in the district, five as Greenfield principal.

Despite the surge of interest in K-8 and research touting how well it works, the National Middle School Association says no school structure has been proven superior to another.

More important, the group says, are a rigorous curriculum, top-shelf teachers and special teaching strategies for a special population. The association said "small, personalized learning environments," often a feature of the K-8 school, best meet the needs of middle-grade pupils.

The small-scale setting might be one of the factors fueling Greenfield's success. With 180 middle-grade pupils, 100 to 500 fewer than the city's middle schools, Mr. Johnson said, he was able to keep a handle on discipline.

"Honestly, I don't think I've expelled anybody for three years," he said.

It helped that about half his middle-grade pupils had been at the school since kindergarten, enabling faculty to build relationships with them. Ms. Robinson attributed the orderly environment to the high level of parental involvement, something more common at a K-8 than at a middle school.

Children at Greenfield have a lower level of poverty, another factor tied to performance, than those in the city's average K-8 and middle schools.

Proponents of K-8 schools say elementary children have a calming effect on older pupils, especially when siblings are spread across grade levels. But critics, including some Pittsburgh parents, worry about older pupils bullying younger ones in restrooms and on school buses.

Mr. Johnson gave middle-grade pupils opportunities to work with elementary children but tried to keep unsupervised contact to a minimum, even if that meant giving older pupils less freedom than they would have had in a middle school. He required middle-grade pupils to line up and walk to lunch in a group, escorted by a teacher, to keep them from trampling kindergartners during a mad rush to the cafeteria.

"If you look at the size of some of the eighth-graders, if they would bump into a 5-year-old, they would knock him clear to kingdom come," he said.

Mr. Johnson said the disadvantages of K-8 schools include a small number of middle-grade teachers, who have the same pupils for three years. If a teacher and pupil don't get along, he said, both face a long, difficult road.

While a city middle school takes in pupils from numerous elementary schools, a K-8 generally draws from a smaller area.

Greenfield is a neighborhood school, but it attracts pupils -- 75, one year -- from other city schools and from private schools. Even troubled transfer pupils have assimilated into the school's culture.

"I was afraid to start over, afraid of how the students and teachers would treat me," a pupil who enrolled at the school four years ago recently wrote in an essay titled, "What Greenfield School Has Meant to Me." The writing assignment was required of eighth-graders.

"Making A's and B's is no longer a chore for me," the pupil said. "It is something that I now know I can do and want to do. Not challenging myself is no longer an option, and that is what I will take with me."

A breed apart

In recent years, Cleveland Municipal School District has converted about 80 schools to the K-8 structure. Lisa Ruda, interim chief executive officer, said the district liked to expand a school at a rate of one grade level a year.

But last year, the district at one time added three grade levels to about 20 schools, the same rapid expansion as planned for Pittsburgh's new K-8 schools. As a result, Ms. Ruda said, she saw more discipline problems than usual in K-8 schools and believes test scores of some younger pupils might have slipped.

"It was a rough year for us," she said.

Despite the longtime debate over school configuration, the so-called "K-8 debate," the middle school association says middle grades are the forgotten component of public education.

Certification programs for teachers, including those in Pennsylvania, have allowed those with elementary or high-school teaching backgrounds to teach in middle schools. But 10- to 15-year-olds are a discrete group, said Al Summers, the association's director of professional development.

Early adolescence is a time for decisions about alcohol, drugs and sex. Mr. Summers said teachers should channel the group's growing need for social interaction into group discussions and projects. And that fidgeting?

Because of changes in their spines, Mr. Summers said, middle-grade pupils might have a difficult time sitting still.

The middle school association said districts had to make sure middle-grade teachers are prepared to work, and want to work, with that age group.

"I wanted to be a high-school teacher," Mr. Summers said.

But like many secondary-certified teachers unable to get high-school jobs, he took a position teaching seventh- and eighth-graders and quickly found himself over his head. Mr. Summers said he knew of a teacher assigned to a middle-grade classroom after teaching kindergarten for 22 years.

"It was a disaster," he said.

Hard work ahead

The city school district has a challenge putting teachers in the right places for the next school year. In all, Mr. Roosevelt closed 22 elementary and middle schools, setting off a huge game of musical chairs as teachers use a combination of district and building seniority to find new positions.

Personnel is one of many details to be ironed out.

After parents asked whether the new K-8 schools would serve elementary-size meals to middle-grade pupils, as Greenfield has done, Mr. Roosevelt inspected lunch there and at now-closed Milliones Middle School in the Hill District. The district said last week that all K-8 schools would begin offering bigger portions and more food choices to older pupils.

Because of space constraints, three of the district's new K-8's -- Faison, Lincoln and Schaeffer -- will operate two buildings each. Except for Schaeffer, one building will be for K-4 classes and the other for 5-8. Schaeffer will be divided into K-3 and 4-8.

Critics say that arrangement means the creation of three small middle schools, eliminating a K-8's benefits.

But Denise "Sparkle" Peterson, principal of Colin L. Powell Academy for Success in Long Beach, Calif., said she'd had five years of improving test scores in a K-8 school that uses several buildings on a campus to educate 1,400 pupils. While middle-grade pupils have their own classrooms, they mix with elementary children and stay "younger longer."

"This is the best. It is the model," said Ms. Peterson, a former elementary teacher and middle school administrator who will attend the summit this week.

From time to time, city school officials have converted an elementary school to a K-8 at the request of parent and neighborhood groups. That's how Greenfield grew to a K-8 in the late 1990s.

But severe academic and financial problems sometimes prompt districts to make sweeping shifts to K-8 programs, something happening here now.

A Rand Corp. study determined that sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders in city K-8 schools and magnet middle schools outperformed peers in traditional middle schools. Rand said the K-8 was particularly beneficial to black students, who lag white peers in math and reading across the district.

But the K-8 school isn't superior in every case.

In November 2002, as the School District of Philadelphia was in the midst of a K-8 transition, the nonprofit Philadelphia Education Fund released a study showing that "the typical high-poverty K-8 school outperforms the typical high-poverty middle school." However, researchers found that some middle schools outperformed K-8 schools and that K-8 and middle schools serving the same neighborhoods had similar performances.

City school officials don't expect new school configurations alone to boost middle-grade test scores. As the middle school association recommends, the district is boosting faculty development and revamping curriculum for K-8 schools and the higher-performing middle schools still open.

The Philadelphia Education Fund said research as late as 2004 confirmed that K-8 schools, overall, continued to outperform middle schools and that K-8 schools had stronger student-teacher bonds, less faculty turnover and fewer discipline problems than middle schools.

Despite last school year's challenges, Ms. Ruda, of Cleveland, remains a believer in K-8 schools. "The data is indisputable," she said.