Ahead of the first year of the new Lebanon Junior High School, district Supt. Nicole Malinoski and incoming principal to the new building Nick Bullock sat down to discuss the new school, the state of the district, and what’s coming next for students.
Starting in August, approximately 750 seventh and eighth grade students, along with teachers and staff will occupy Lebanon Junior High School for its inaugural year.
In subsequent years, says Bullock, the school will be occupied by closer to 800 students.
Bullock, a Lebanon School District alumni himself, began his career teaching Spanish at Lebanon High School and has been the principal at Lebanon Middle School for the past two years.
The new building will allow some breathing room for the district in terms of space and provide a stronger and more modern learning environment for those students, said Bullock.
“Really seeing the range that spreads from sixth grade to eighth grade in terms of maturity and just overall life experience for the students is a really long range. Moving the seventh and eighth, we’re excited to have more of a focus and a lot more commonality in terms of our student demographics.”
Having an entire school dedicated to the seventh and eighth grade allows the district to better prepare those students for their future earlier, Bullock said. He added that seventh grade is around the time students begin the back end of their K-12 education and begin to think more about their future.
The new school features a green screen room for media students, technology education classroom, an open space media center, a gym that Malinoski says might make the high school athlete “a little jealous of their junior high counterparts” and a weight room that will be used at both levels.
Bullock said most of the 7th and 8th grade staff will be moved to the new school, and a new teacher and curriculum has been added for the technology education classroom. General education teachers have been added to the grades over the last few years to not only relieve overcrowding of classrooms but also so it wouldn’t be such a huge hit to the budget in one year.
The district will host a community open house on Sept. 10, welcoming anyone from the community to come see the new school.
The additional space couldn’t come at a better time for the district and will help them to continue to educate the future of the community for a number of years. Malinoski said that at the middle school there were 10 classrooms held in trailers behind the middle school.
“There’s not enough space within the middle school to serve all those students,” she said.
Teaching in crowded conditions can be a stressor for teachers and students, as more students in a classroom means less individual attention per student.
Around 5,000 students were enrolled in the district last school year, and while numbers have been relatively flat between then and at least 2019, they foresee increases to begin again in about two years based on birth rates.
But Malinoski says that all it takes for the district to see an enrollment boom is another natural disaster, as had happened in 2013 during hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico.
Renovations are beginning on the current middle school, which will later come to be the intermediate school and house fifth and sixth grade, as fifth grade currently occupies elementary schools across the district.
But the new school won’t entirely fix the district’s space needs, Malinoski said. Moving the fifth grade from the elementary schools won’t be lending them as much room as they would like, and at the high school level, they’re virtually out of room, especially with office space, explaining that two assistant principals had to share a space last year.
With the goal of adding CTE programs to the high school, they’ve considered the idea of trying to move the district office to a new space in the future.
District-wide goals
Malinoski, who was appointed superintendent by the board in January following the passing of Supt. Arthur Abrom, said that the position so far has been quite the experience.
Recently, she and her team have decided on what to do with her previous position as secondary director of teaching and learning, reshaping the position so that instead of a director of elementary teaching and learning and of secondary teaching and learning, there are now just two directors of teaching and learning focused on different areas.
One of those directors focuses on core programming from K-12, with the other focusing on programs and partnerships and the engagement of students and families.
“I think that when you lead a cabinet you have to look at the strengths of all of your team members just to see where you think there’s an area that you need additional support, and what does that look like,” she said. “Just because everyone has different strengths and areas of growth.”
Malinoski began her career in teaching at Cornwall-Lebanon School District, where she spent 20 years across various roles, then two years at Cumberland Valley School District as a multi-site high school principal, before she joined Lebanon School District as the secondary director of teaching and learning in July of 2022.
While the district is working towards solutions to its space issue, future proofing itself to help better educate the students of the future, there are other spots where the district is finding success.
“My favorite saying to say is that ‘we are on the edge of greatness here,’” she said. “We are. It makes the hair stand up on arms. We just went through a comprehensive planning process where we worked with a team from administrators, community members, parents, students and changed our district’s mission and vision statement as well as created a portrait of a graduate project.”
The portrait of a graduate project established competencies, such as leadership and adaptability, among others, that the district believes students will have attained by the time they graduate, the development of the competencies will integrated into the classroom.
As a part of the comprehensive plan, they’ve set four key priority areas to improve throughout the district: student attendance, student engagement, core student achievement and continued establishment of high expectations for students.
“We have an amazing team of teachers, great administrators, a great community with a rich history and we want to ensure that we are setting our students up to be successful once they graduate here,” Malinoski said.
They’ve also recently gone through a rebranding process, a result of Lebanon High School mass communications students placing third at the Jostens Epic School Revamp Contest.
In addition to those key priorities outlined in the comprehensive plan, Malinoski said the district is also concerned with ensuring that transient students are having their educational needs met. These students not only come from districts inside and out of the state, but in some cases leave the district and later come back, with lapses in education because not all schools offer the same classes or teach curriculum the same way.
One goal they hope might help that population is to try and re-engage parents more in the educational process, both by improving their communication with parents and by beginning to offer classes to parents, to ensure that parents too know what their children’s needs are.
Classes offered to parents will include things like how elementary students are being taught ELA, to how to enroll their student involved in a sport.
“Our parents want the best for their kids and we want the best for their kids, but we just have to make sure there’s a stronger partnership there working together,” Malinoski said.
Incoming CTE programs
This district is currently in the process of introducing career and technology education courses at the high school level with the effort beginning with the addition of an education pathway for students, with the hope that it will introduce more teachers into the local economy.
“Just like every district out there, there’s not enough teachers. We want to convince our students that yes we want you to be our future Cedar teachers.”
The education pathway is expected to be added by the end of this school year.
Next, they plan to introduce a child care program that would either allow the district to run their own child care program or work in conjunction with the YMCA.
Other programs that are either being developed have begun applications with the state include communication technology and secretarial, marketing and entrepreneurship business programs.
Future programs that the district will be looking into include building trades, electronics, health careers and cosmetology.
Daniel Larlham Jr. is a reporter for the Lebanon Daily News. Reach him at [email protected] or on X @djlarlham.
This article originally appeared on Lebanon Daily News: Take a sneak peek inside Lebanon School District’s new junior high
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