By Nolan Talley, Staff Reporter
The Tredyffrin/Easttown school board education committee approved changes to the middle schools’ schedule starting in the 2025-26 school year. The district is required to make adjustments to the curriculum to comply with updated statewide educational standards in Science, Technology, Engineering, Environmental Literacy and Sustainability (STEELS).
The changes include a new STEM class, replacing Technology Education and adjustments to the special area classes. The STEM course will be a full-year class for seventh and eighth graders and a one-semester class for fifth and sixth graders. All students are required to attend 30 sessions of the STEM course.
VFMS Principal Matthew Gibson collaborated with other district administrators and teachers to ensure the school curricula adhered to new regulations.
“New state standards in science, technology, engineering, environmental literacy and sustainability — STEELS — go into effect in the next school year,” Gibson said. “Even though science instruction will cover a lot of the standards, they can’t cover them all, so we had to create the other class.”
In addition, the district will redesign the advisory period and limit special area classes, except physical education, to one semester.
The advisory period for fifth and sixth grades will turn into a daily class. Advisory periods will no longer be part of the special area cycle, which is a six-day rotation of classes including the new STEM class. Students in fifth and sixth grades will have advisory class every day, rather than only two out of six cycle days.
The updated advisory period will replace the initiative component of advisory for seventh and eighth grades. Currently, the enrichment component of advisory is a period during which students participate in programs highlighting topics, such as creativity and social responsibility.
The revised advisory period for seventh and eighth grades will include family choice extensions where guardians and students will be allowed to choose from art, music and physical education enrichment activities. The physical education family choice extension is limited to students in seventh and eighth grades, and a STEM family choice extension is a future possibility.
Mark Cataldi, the director of assessment and accountability for the school district, has spoken about the changes at past school board meetings. He said that they will provide students with more opportunities to support their learning.
“The students will have the opportunity to complete work, seek a teacher for extra help, like seeing a science teacher, school-recommended support, reading, writing, math, executive function, well-being. Students have opportunities to do what we call extensions: art extensions, music extensions and phys ed extensions,” Cataldi said. “World language will continue to be a choice, Spanish or French in five-six grade courses.”
Although the district will remove the initiative component, Gibson is hopeful that staff will be able to incorporate the most enriching and popular aspects of the course into the new schedule.
“I think there are some valuable lessons and some activities that the students found very informative and enriching (from advisory initiative),” Gibson said. “They (teachers) don’t have a spot for it, but (the teacher) knows the kids really enjoyed it, and it might be a better fit somewhere.”
Nolan Talley can be reached at [email protected].
