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There is no educational basis to consolidate Warwick’s high schools. They each actually have slightly more students than studies show is ideal. It is not just class size but also grade and school size that should be considered when determining whether to consolidate high schools.

A school district should not determine how many students should be in an individual high school only by the building's capacity. The three highs schools all currently have between 900 and 990 students. If the consolidation was approved, it appears that one of the remaining schools would have been assigned an additional 600 students and the other would have been assigned an additional 300. In addition, the proposed new super junior high school would have had 500 students in each grade.

Please review the articles and studies listed below that demonstrate that smaller schools, at least those below one thousand students with individual grades no bigger than about 250 students, are the best academic, social, and disciplinary environments for high school students. Our current high schools are finally down to these near acceptable levels. Consolidating the high schools would have returned them to well over that acceptable level. In addition, there is no basis for putting 500 students in one grade in a school, which was the proposal for the super junior high school. The WPS argument of using economy of scale (to keep high schools large to reduce costs per student) was accepted during the middle of the 20th century but has been discredited since the 1990s. There was no discussion about the best educational environment in the Long Term Facility Planning Committee Report; it only discussed cost savings. That alone made the report an unacceptable basis to support a vote to close a high school.

These are some of the articles and studies stressing the importance of smaller schools:

New York, small school perform better: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/size-matters-nyc-high-schools-smaller-gain-big-article-1.1494953;

NYU New York: http://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/highschoolsize-effectsonbudget...pdf

MIT Study of NY Schools: http://economics.mit.edu/files/9158

Private schools keep schools smaller to improve education: http://privateschool.about.com/od/choosingaschool/qt/sizematters.htm

University of Texas Study:

http://www.edb.utexas.edu/hsns/HSNSbrief1.pdf

U.S Department of Education

http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ovae/pi/hsinit/papers/turn.pdf

From: Now what for schools?

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