District Phasing Out Two-House Structure At HBW

Verona’s new superintendent, Diane DiGiuseppe, has begun to consolidate H.B. Whitehorne Middle School back under a single principal and assistant principal. The consolidation, which will be phased in over three school years, will allow the district to re-allocate spending to other grades and schools.

In 2015, then Superintendent Dr. Rui Dionisio split HBW into two “houses,” each with a principal and separate grade-level teams in language arts, science, social studies, math and special education. Dionisio envisioned it as a way to bring more personalized learning to middle school years while building students’ social skills.

But the two-house model has created what DiGiuseppe calls a “significant” issue with the school district’s budget, which is perennially tight. While HBW has roughly the same student population as Verona High School, HBW has needed seven or eight more teachers to satisfy the scheduling requirements of the house model. “Due to this model, we spend more in salaries at HBW for grades five through eight than we do for grades one through four,” DiGiuseppe wrote in a September 26 letter to parents. DiGiuseppe became Verona’s first female superintendent in July 2022.

She would now like to spend more money on professional development overall and on special education and inclusion classes in the elementary schools, and needs to find the money to do so. “We are short-staffed across the elementary grades in both general and special education,” DiGiuseppe wrote. “Seven grade-level sections in grades one through 4 have class sizes starting the year at or above twenty-four students. These large class sizes have required families to place their children in non-neighborhood elementary schools or have students from the same family in more than one elementary school.”

DiGiuseppe said that Verona needs to increase the number of special education teachers to serve the number of students with an Individualized Educational Plan (IEP), and provide so-called inclusion classes, where students are taught by both a general education teacher and a special education teacher. The district is now testing an inclusion program at Brookdale, Forest, and F.N. Brown elementary schools. “This pilot is a start, but we need to do better, and we can do better,” she wrote. “Expanding these opportunities by providing inclusion options in all grades where student needs exist is necessary.”

DiGiuseppe also wants to deliver more math and language arts instruction to fifth graders. She says that fifth grade is not a middle school grade in most districts and that by having it at HBW in a two-house system, students are getting half of the instruction in those two areas that they would be getting if they were still in their elementary schools.

At the beginning of this school year, DiGiuseppe informed HBW parents that David Galbiercyzk, who has been principal of HBW’s Carnegie house, would now be HBW’s sole principal, and that Thomas Lancaster, principal of the Olmstead house, will be assistant principal. Their house assignments will stay the same for the 2023-2024 school year. Galbierczyk moved to HBW in 2015 after 15 years at VHS. Lancaster, who was hired as the assistant principal at VHS in 2015, moved to HBW in 2021 following the retirement of Yvette McNeal.

DiGiuseppe says this will save only about $4,000 initially but could save more in future years. But she stressed, in her letter to parents, that the consolidation does not mean layoffs. “Please know that I am not looking for a way to impose a reduction in force on the HBW staff,” she wrote, “but to reallocate staff to address deficits in programming for our students with the greatest needs across all grade levels.“

In the 2024-2025 school year, DiGiuseppe plans to implement scheduling changes for fifth grade students, and possibly sixth graders as well. The following school year, there would be scheduling changes for seventh and eighth graders. What those scheduling changes will be is not yet known, but DiGiuseppe says the goal is to provide larger time blocks for instruction, much as is done now at VHS. She has convened a scheduling committee that is working out the specifics.

“One of the benefits of the house model is teaming,” DiGiuseppe said in her letter, “and we are sure we can keep the primary integrity of grade-level teaming in a new configuration; middle schools across the state have a teaming model without a costly house model.”