By By Greg Sukiennik,The Berkshire Eagle

Copyright berkshireeagle

PITTSFIELD — How do you get about 1,300 students from all four corners of the city to a pair of school buildings, and then home again?

That may be the toughest question facing Pittsfield school officials as they strive to make an ambitious middle school restructuring project work.

A consultant working on transportation issues will be running “sandbox scenarios” in the coming weeks to determine how that might work, and whether schedule changes might be necessary to achieve the goal of two citywide middle schools — one for grades 5-6 and another for grades 7-8.

In updates to the School Committee at its two most recent meetings, interim Superintendent Latifah Phillips has cited transportation as perhaps the greatest challenge facing the project.

In an update at Wednesday’s meeting, Phillips said she’s “very confident that we will be ready instructionally to open schools next year. The big piece is the transportation, and so we really are going to push to make sure that we have that information as soon as possible so that we can make that decision.”

And at the Sept. 3 meeting, Phillips told the committee that transportation needs “might impact start and end times. And start and end times will impact other things, like child care and teacher schedules.”

“So we are prioritizing transportation,” she said. “Our consultant is already working on several scenarios to give us an idea of what it’s going to look like.”

The district is restructuring its two middle schools from largely geographic districts to a pair of citywide schools educating fifth and sixth graders at Herberg Middle School and seventh and eighth graders at Reid Middle School. But the clock is ticking: The School Committee decided this summer that the planning process must be meeting its deadlines by December in order to proceed in 2026-27 as planned. Otherwise, the change will wait another school year.

The project comes in response to concerns about its middle schools’ academics and student behaviors. Both schools are in need of targeted assistance according to the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s school accountability metrics, which are based on MCAS scores and other factors. New rankings are expected to be released at the end of the month. Officials have said a good deal of the district’s school choice outflow — 657 students in fiscal 2025, along with $4.23 million in Chapter 70 funds — happens when students reach middle school.

Transportation, and how it will impact work and family schedules, was among concerns raised by residents and parents who felt slowing down the process or finding a way to make the current grades 6-8 alignment work. But School Committee members and members of the restructuring committee said the status quo wasn’t acceptable, pointing to the number of families exercising school choice or Berkshire Arts and Technology Public Charter School for their middle schoolers.

But getting buses there and back again on time isn’t the only question facing the administration and Justin Bolio, a district middle school science teacher who has taken on the role of coordinating the project this year.

In her report to the School Committee on Wednesday, Phillips highlighted efforts to involve staff and community members in two groups helping to guide the project.

She said 22 teachers and school staff have signed up to be a part of a working group that will review research, go on site visits and make recommendations on the optimal school designs for the two campuses.

Meanwhile, the district is planning to send teachers to visit middle schools in Westfield and/or Chelmsford, both of which have recently made the same switch Pittsfield is contemplating. The working group will review data collected from that visit as well as research on instructional models. Next month also will bring focus groups with families, teachers and students.

A second advisory committee is also being formed. Phillips said will seek members from the Middle School Restructuring Committee that developed the plan.

Focus groups involving the last immediate step is the developing the schedule of family focus groups, teacher focus groups and student focus groups.

With staffing and retention remaining an issue in the district, Phillips says the middle school restructuring presents an opportunity to create work environments teachers will want to be a part of.

“That is our goal, to develop something that teachers want to be a part of, rather than developing a school that we have to assign teachers to,” she told the School Committee at its Sept. 3 meeting. “We did prioritize meeting with the union leadership of all of our bargaining units to share our goals, to let them know that know that success is all of us working together.”

The plan envisions a lower middle school at Herberg, where a team teaching approach will fifth and sixth graders make the transition from elementary school, and a seventh and eighth grade upper middle school at Reid, where students will be prepared for high school expectations. It’s also expected that placing all city middle school students and staff in citywide schools would erase perceived or real inequities between Reid and Herberg, making the same enrichment opportunities and support available to all.

“I really am appreciative to everyone who signed up, and we have found some areas where we want to do a little more targeted recruitment,” she said of the working group. “We want to make sure that we have a very diverse working group, diverse by way of grades and school position.”