The York County School Division officially pulled the plug on the Middle Years Programme on Monday night after concerns from teachers put the program’s effectiveness into question.
At Monday’s York County School Division meeting, school board members voted 5-0 to remove the MYP program from the division’s program of studies, which is regularly updated.
According to a recent survey, York County teachers have been largely unsatisfied with the MYP during its time in place at Yorktown Middle School. The reasons they cited for disliking the program mainly pertained to time management and redundancy.
The MYP is a set of curriculum developed by International Baccalaureate, an organization that offers a set of world-based learning curriculum and the IB diploma, a mark that a student has gone through the rigorous IB course load. The MYP aims to prepare sixth- through 10th-graders for the IB course load they would take on during their last two years of high school.
Because of the rigorous courseload, teachers said they did not have enough time to perform both the duties required from the school division and those required from the MYP. Teachers said the program involved too much extra planning and doubled their professional development load, as they were asked to fulfill both YCSD professional development requirements and those of the division.
Teachers also said the transformative learning initiative York County already has in place – a form of teaching that involves experience-based learning — already offered the same type of course load as MYP.
Though teachers in York County determined the program’s benefits did not outweigh the cost, members of the WJCC School Board discussed the program’s implementation during Saturday’s annual budget retreat. While WJCC was discussing budget priorities for the fiscal year 2015 budget, Board Member Heather Cordasco said, because of popular request, she would like to put the program on the radar during the formation of the budget.
Chairwoman Ruth Larson expressed concerns about adding the program because YCSD had such low success with it. Superintendent Steven Constantino said while the program might be a good place to start, he thought it was part of a bigger conversation about implementing more programs that offer more specialized and skills-oriented learning in the division.
Board Member Jim Kelly said he did not know if specialized learning would be should be a huge priority for middle schools because students often change their minds about what they want to do for a profession several times.
The Yorktown MYP will be canceled at Yorktown effective next school year. The WJCC School Board will pick up their MYP conversation during future discussions on the 2015 budget.
