Nearly 3,000 Madison students will be heading back to school next week. The 2016/2017 school year officially begins Tuesday, Sept. 6 and Superintendent of Schools Tom Scarice said students, staff, and parents have a lot to look forward to.

This new school year will kick off with a new start time for Walter C. Polson Middle School, a new teaching structure at Dr. Robert H. Brown Middle School, a new school lunch program, facilities improvements, and an updated curriculum. Scarice said the district just finished the adoption of a K-12 language arts and math curriculum this past spring.

“We are on a curriculum renewal cycle in which every two years another department is coming online for a new curriculum,” he said. “We are finished with math and language arts, we are half way through world language and social studies, and this summer we started science.”

With the updated curriculum, Scarice said the district is looking to maximize instructional time. To allow for longer class periods, the district has shifted the schedule for some students at Brown Middle School.

“Brown has made some changes at the 5th grade level and if that goes well it could also go to the 6th grade level next year,” he said. “Brown had been teams of four teachers that would share 80 to 100 kids and now we have broken Brown’s 5th grade into two-teacher teams so two teachers would share about 40 kids.”

Under the new model, students will have 70 minute learning blocks, an increase from the approximately 50 minute periods used in the previous model. Scarice said the change will help students better transition from the elementary to upper middle school teaching model.

“It is a nice developmental move from one teacher in 4th grade and then to Polson, where you have four teachers,” he said. “This is a nice intermediary step—it gives some movement for kids between classes, yet they still have just two primary teachers and also for parents, too, who then have two primary points of contact as opposed to four. We thought developmentally at that age it was a good thing.”

For those students starting at or returning to Polson this year, students will be starting their day later. The Board of Education (BOE) voted last year to move the Polson start time from 7:30 a.m. to 8 a.m. after lengthy discussions over the possible benefits of later start times. Scarice said changing the start time was complicated, but will be beneficial to the community overall.

“We had a lot of moving parts because the high school and the community access Polson’s building for the gym and the auditorium, so we had to make sure if we created one change, we didn’t create four other problems,” he said. “We had to really go through that deliberately and we landed in a spot that we think is going to be overall better for kids and better for the community.”

Scarice said the start time change could also help shorten the morning commute to school.

“It could serve to reduce a lot of the traffic on Green Hill Road in the morning by staggering Polson and Daniel Hand High School (DHHS),” he said. “Folks were giving themselves 15- to 20 minutes extra in the past just to get through that one road. By staggering, it could be a very positive, unintended consequence.”

The biggest district-wide change this year, according to Scarice, will be the change in the school lunch program. The Board of Education voted to leave the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and the State of Connecticut Healthy Foods Certification Program in June of this year, opting for more freedom in school lunch offerings.

“Probably the one thing that folks will interface with the most is the new school lunch program and that is probably the most profound change from prior years,” he said.

Finally, this summer the district completed several facilities maintenance projects across the district, including a new roof for Polson and improved wi-fi across all of the buildings. While Scarice said the district completed the projects that needed to be done, they are waiting to make a decision on the school utilization study before taking on any more big projects.

The school utilization study, which was set aside during this year’s budget development, will come back to the BOE at its regular meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 6. While the district has made some changes this year and a big decision lies ahead, Scarice said the district is focused on maintaining their instructional vision.

“Our biggest focus has been on staying the course really,” he said. “We created a new vision 4 ½ years ago when I got here and I am just proud that we are staying the course. I think the consistency is what is best for teachers, students, and the community.”