S. Elgin High's breakfast program shows promise

When I attended high school, I typically grabbed a bagel or a Pop-Tart in the morning and later consumed the paltry breakfast during or immediately before my first period.

Today's high school students are not much different. A survey of students at South Elgin High School found that more than 60 percent of them were skipping at least one meal a week, with as many as 18 percent never eating breakfast before school.

To remedy that situation, staff at South Elgin High School applied successfully for a grant to fund a breakfast cart they can wheel around during morning study periods.

While the breakfast still comes at a cost (a more than reasonable $1.25), the cart has made breakfast more accessible to students, with staff seeing a greater than 100 percent increase in participation in the breakfast program.

It remains to be seen if those numbers will be sustained throughout the school year, but if the program does prove a success, it may be an example for other schools to follow.

The cost of the grant? Only $2,500.

Are multi-grade classrooms good for kids? Because of budget pressures, more students in Elgin Area School District U-46 are in multi-grade classrooms this year.

According to the district's own research, students who are in multi-grade classrooms do no worse than peers in traditional, single-grade classrooms.

The research I found arrived at similar conclusions.

A 2002 review of the literature by the Center for Education Policy at the University of Southern Maine concluded: “The preponderance of evidence suggests that there are few academic or social differences between students educated in a multi-grade classroom and students placed in the more traditional, single-grade setting.”

A 2009 working paper prepared by the Institute for Education Sciences, part of the U.S. Department of Education, arrived at a slightly different conclusion. The study found a small, negative effect in multi-grade classrooms in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“We found consistently small and negative effects on student achievement, regardless of grade or subject, even controlling for teacher characteristics,” the study concludes. “While several of these effects were statistically significant … none was large enough to be substantively significant.”

No one, however, denies the challenges of working in a multi-grade classroom, when teachers sometimes have to teach two curriculums essentially at the same time. It is too early to tell how multi-grade instruction is affecting students' long-term performance in Elgin schools.

As the 2009 paper points out, economic pressures may lead to even more split-grade classrooms in coming years, meaning it is even more crucial that educators study the effects: “The constrained fiscal environments facing many of the nation's districts may lend fresh impetus to this practice; as such, it is important to understand how students placed in these classrooms perform relative to their peers.”