Teachers, students and parents packed the Howard County Board of Education Thursday, Jan. 12, lambasting a plan that would eliminate traditional reading classes in county middle schools and shift reading instruction into other subject areas.
"Students need time to read, and time to be readers," said Dottie Tingen, a teacher at Patuxent Valley Middle School. "This is not going to be provided in a content classroom."
The school system's central office staff first proposed the change in December to help prepare students for a new national assessment.
Also, school officials want to align the county with the new state curriculum, which places more importance on cross-curricular reading, or reading in specific content areas such as English or social studies, said schools spokeswoman Patti Caplan.
No specific direction was provided on how to make any needed changes, Caplan said.
Howard County is the only district in the state that still has traditional reading classes in middle schools.
But at the hearing, teachers argued that the proposal ignores some important factors. For example, Wayne Baston, a reading teacher at Folly Quarter Middle School, said research cited in the proposal in support of "integrated literacy" is specific to high school students, not middle school students.
"We already have a successful reading program, as scores have shown year after year," Baston said. "The proposed schedule is a solution in search of a problem."
Other teachers agreed. "Middle school is a time when intensive reading instruction is needed the most," said Cathi McNees, a teacher at Clarksville Middle School. "Research focuses on the need for explicit reading instruction because dabbling through the content areas only doesn't work."
Teachers also expressed concern that the new plan would alter the middle school schedule. Currently, middle schools operate on a variation of an eight-period day. Under the new proposal, the schools would have seven 50-minute periods.
Paul Lemle, president of the Howard County Education Association — which unanimously condemned the proposal — said the new schedule would only allot teachers 50 minutes of planning time a day. And depending on obligations for administrative and group planning, not all teachers would have even that time.
"The proposal you consider today eliminates this time for every world language teacher, every technology teacher, every art, music, PE, health teacher," he said. "This violates the law, and our agreement; you would make their jobs impossible if you did so, and you would slap them in the face."
If approved, the new schedule would go into effect with the start of the 2012-2013 school year, which teachers said was too soon.
Robert Miller, band director at Hammond Middle School, called for pilot programs to test the idea.
David Smith, band director at Clarksville Middle School, called the process by which staff created the proposal disingenuous because it lacked input from the teachers themselves.
"This isn't a tweak, this isn't an adjustment — this is a massive implosion," Smith said. "If you want to blow up the schedule, great, but when you put it back together … do it correctly."
A final vote on the proposal is scheduled for Jan. 26; a work session, previously scheduled for the same night as the hearing, was moved to Thursday, Jan. 19, to allow time for more public testimony.