Dear Parents,

I hope the month of May is treating you and your darling children well!  I want to give you a bit of an enrollment update and what research suggests is the optimal class size for student achievement.

We are pleased to share that many of our K-8 classrooms will have 18+ students, we have a wait list for P2 students, and we are opening up a new P4 classroom as to accommodate the students that were on the P4 wait list.  Moreover, we are welcoming 54 new families and 85 new students.  The new students are enrolling in classrooms throughout the P2-8^th Grade program.  This is a testament to our wonderful program and our teachers!

We speak often of our school model and small class sizes as they relate to student achievement.  Although this may seem like a promotional point of interest; the correlation of the two has been researched proving achievement increases due to low class size.

According to the Center for Public Education (2006), the Brookings Institute (2011), and Johns-Hopkins University (1998):

In order to get around large class sizes and a large student to teacher ratio, many elementary and middle schools hire in class paraprofessionals to assist.  Although this helps with classroom management, it does not necessarily correlate to student achievement.  According to Gerber, S. B., Finn, J. D., Achilles, C. M., & Boyd-Zaharias, J. (2001), suggests that many paraprofessionals are ill prepared to perform tasks.  The results showed that teacher aides have little, if any, positive effect on students' academic achievement.  The only positive effect was an improvement in reading scores for students who attended a class with a teacher aide for 2 or 3 years.  These results were the only exceptions to a plethora of negative findings.  The study also showed that the types of duties aides performed had no bearing on student achievement.

 

We believe the model that has been in place at BSCS speaks for itself.  From year-to-year, our ITBS student achievement data shows that our students are 1 to 2 years above their peers.  Here, teachers differentiate instruction in order to maximize individual student learning, they receive professional development and re-certification credit every year, and an intense one-on-one academic support is provided by one staff member using the "pull-out" model.

 

We are a great school, our enrollment trend is on the up-tick, we believe in what we do, we are BSCS!

God bless all of you and your children,

Carla