The 2024-2025 school year will unveil the new pod redesign for the Hastings Middle School. This radical change of the physical structure of the middle school aims to address and reduce the number of behavior issues occurring within the school.
The pod redesign, spearheaded by interim middle school principal Trent Hanson, groups grades together in smaller areas in order to “make the experience more personal, smaller,” said Hanson.
The pod redesign was approved at the May 22 School Board meeting, with a price tag of $235,000. The change works to keep grades grouped more closely together, both reducing the overall distance students need to travel to get from class to class, as well as reducing the overlap between grades. Grades will have their own portions of the middle school with all core classes grouped alongside each other and often on the same floor.
“Flow of the building was always something we struggled with,” said District 200 School Board Director Matt Bruns, a former special education teacher at Hastings Middle School.
According to Bruns, before the redesign, the middle school classrooms were organized by content. Math classrooms were generally grouped alongside math classrooms, social studies with social studies, etc. That design meant that students would travel further across the school to get to their core curriculum classes and grades would overlap in that travel.
“The farther a student has to go, the more that can get in their way,” said Hanson.
According to Hanson, the redesign isn’t explicitly meant to separate the grades from each other, but to “have those interactions better structured.” Hanson cited the “wide spectrum” of development between fifth and eighth grades necessitating better interaction: “The developmental jumps between fifth and eighth grade can be really significant.”
Hanson came to the middle school as interim principal at the beginning of 2024, midway through the school year. He is open about the issues the school faced.
“Student behavior was the chief concern this year,” he said.
An uptick in behavior issues in post-pandemic schools is not an isolated issue to the Hastings Middle School.
A 2022 study from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) found that behavioral issues like classroom disruptions, prohibited use of electronic devices, acts of disrespect to teachers, and rowdiness outside of the classroom were up more than 40% as compared to pre-pandemic school years. The middle school pod redesign is a macro-level redesign of the school to address behavior issues.
Hanson describes the shift as “the difference in living in a small village versus a big urban environment.” By reducing not only the footprint of a student’s day, but the population that flows through that footprint, students shift towards a more intimate, personal space: that of a village instead of a city. Director Bruns adds that the smaller area and population within it will work to build a sense of home for each grade in their own grade-level section of the school.
According to Director Bruns, a key part of the pod redesign is data gathered from the school information system. When students are issued behavior warnings, that data is collected and aggregated, allowing teachers and administrators to see exactly how often students are, for example, caught running in the halls and when.
Using that data, patterns and trends can be identified. The pod redesign attempts to address these issues at a macro level.
To watch full videos of the school board meetings, including the May 22 meeting where the middle school pod redesign was approved, visit Hastings Community Television’s YouTube page at https://www.youtube.com/@HastingsCommunityTV