Community - Lion's Roar

Dear Lion Families,

Since last year, the District has been actively engaged in discussing and researching what would be best for our District in terms of our grade level format. Information has been shared with our community since last Spring in the hopes of reaching as many people as possible. The community was surveyed to gather their sense of willingness to consider a different structure, and the District collected feedback on any shared concerns.

The survey results / information gathered:

Families were supportive of us considering the change in structure even if some of the families did express some concerns. As the data was analyzed, there was no sub-group who significantly opposed considering the plan.

A significant number of respondents either were in favor of the concept or were willing to support the District and work with us to evaluate the potential benefits.

A significant number of respondents indicated they felt the District did attempt to address initial concerns shared by families.

This feedback provided us with a level of comfort to continue to explore the topic. Our community was not significantly opposed, and there was openness to the concept.

Further Steps:

The District solicited feedback from other school districts to learn from their success.

The District did review research which showed student academic benefits are achieved when similar grade level teachers are able to work together.

We also considered the fact that our 5th grade has been working together for years as a complete team in LMS. We did not believe separating them would be in the District's best interest.

1. We will be monitoring student discipline incidents in all buildings. The goal is to decrease bullying reports and discipline incidents - especially in grades 6 - 8. (This will be a multi-year data tracking event. We hope to begin seeing decreases in prior trend data beginning in 6th grade during the 2026 - 2027 school year.)

2. We will be monitoring student growth on District benchmarks and state testing assessments. (This will be a multi-year data tracking event. We hope to begin seeing increases in testing data beginning in the year 2026 - 2027.)

3. We will be monitoring walkthrough and teacher evaluation data for programmatic implementation effectiveness in the classroom. (We hope to begin seeing data confirmation by the end of 2026.)

On behalf of the District, we would like to thank you for your support in this effort. It has been months of discussion, planning, and review. We do believe bringing our students and teachers together as one community from the beginning of their educational journey will be beneficial to your child's learning experience in the Lindenwold School District.