Sometimes you CAN judge a book by its cover, or at least a building. Parents at the new Patterson Mill Middle High School in Bel Air have plenty of concerns about the walkways, fields and facilities on school grounds. Meetings with school officials are ongoing. But now that the building has been open for a year, it turns out there are problems on the inside too.
The school might have some of the latest technology, but something as simple as lockers are scarce. Patterson Mill was planned to handle 1,600 students and 1,672 lockers were installed. But the current state rated capacity is 1,763, meaning the school will be 91 lockers short when full enrollment is reached, which is likely to happen next year. Sharing lockers will be tough. They’re short, small and stacked in twos.
But the more pressing problem is crowding: surprisingly, current enrollment is not the cause. On the second floor where the high school is housed, there’s only one thoroughfare connecting all of the classrooms. When each period ends, students have to converge on that pathway and literally shuffle along in a sea of humanity to get to the next class. And that’s with only 9th, 10th and 11th graders in the school. Next year when all four grades are in place, the hallways will look like Times Square on New Year’s Eve, minus the frivolity.
In 2004, Harford County Government appropriated a million dollars or so to correct a similar problem at Fallston Middle School in response to long-standing complaints about crowding. That was going on at around the same time Patterson Mill was being planned – what happened to ”lessons learned”? More importantly, why was a school designed with isolated cul-de-sacs connected to one main hallway in the first place? The answer might be found in just two words: Career Clusters.
The concept is another doozy from the Maryland State Department of Education that tries to funnel 14-year-olds onto a career path. Harford County Public Schools went one step further and foolishly built the idea into the design of Patterson Mill. The thinking was that classes in a particular Career Cluster could be set up in the same corridor, so students wouldn’t travel as much as they do in a typical high school. I attended the planning meetings and remember the discussion. Red flags were raised at the time, but the plan rolled on and so far, it’s a bust.
What’s curious is that the Board of Education didn’t approve the specifics for Career Clusters until they were adopted as part of CSSRP in 2005, but the minutes from the planning meetings show the concept had a booster as far back as 2003 when the layout of the building was being considered. Two years before the Board of Education’s vote, Executive Director of Secondary Schools Dave Volrath presciently outlined three broad Career Clusters for Patterson Mill which is the same number of cul-de-sacs jamming up the school today.
School-based administrators at Patterson Mill are trying to find fixes, but what if the fix requires money? That’s a problem because what little was available was transferred out of the school’s capital account to pay for other projects before the dust had settled on Patterson Mill. As parents work with school officials to identify options, it’s worth telling the story if only because new high schools are coming soon to Edgewood and Bel Air. Thankfully, the design of those schools mirrors Aberdeen High School more than Patterson Mill and while all of these projects were greatly needed and enthusiastically received, the experience at Patterson Mill means parents and other taxpayers might not want to assume that’s the end of the story.
I don’t understand the comment “what little there was left in the fund was transferred”…….one of the many articles I read relating to the Patterson Mill construction fund indicated that there was over a million dollars left in that fund. Has it all been transferred away? And by the way, the description of the hallways is not entirely accurate…..there are three ‘wings’ connecting to the main hallway, and each of those wings has probably 20 classrooms opening off it…..downstairs in the middle school each wing is set up to house predominantly one grade, so the kids don’t have to traverse a lot of ground between classes. If high schoolers have to do so it’s a function of their class choices. Additionally, Patterson Mill is on an ‘honor system’ with respect to class starting times and recording tardies – there is no bell to tell anyone when to start class or end class. So the whole notion of getting to class ‘on time’ is very subjective………another topic……..
You are right, patterson mill parent, there was $1.6 million in the capital account at one time (which is little compared to the cost of the project – about $60 million and little compared to what it could cost to make changes at this late date).
Some of that was being held for work not yet complete or not yet paid for, other amounts were transferred out by the Board for other capital needs ($100,000 for portables, $100,000 for the new Shucks Road ES project). What’s left is intended for furniture and equipment needed when the high school has all four grades: $69,000.
We can call them wings or cul-de-sacs, the point is, they are only open on one end. The only way for high school students to travel to the next wing/cul-de-sac is to go into the main hallway, which is the reason there is a bottleneck now, and the high school is still only 3/4 full.
High school students don’t choose their class locations, only their classes. And they are required to take certain classes that are not in the same cul-de-sac, not to mention travel to the cafeteria, gym and music rooms which are downstairs and again, only accessible via stairs off the main hallway.
One option is to reassign classroom locations with an eye toward minimizing students traveling between the three cul-de-sacs, if that’s possible given the varying coursework taken by high school students. Or more teachers may be asked to move from room to room during the day. Those are school-based decisions that will depend on a lot of factors and may have to be adjusted every year. But a simple back hallway connecting the three areas would have created a lot more flexibility and much better flow.
As a teacher at Patterson Mill, I can agree to the issue of congestion, especially for the high school. The middle school is less of an issue because students spend 5 out of their 7 periods a day in the “cul-de-sacs.” These are problems that everyone wants to fix and remember that school personnel have very little to no say in how a school is designed.
However, what I find interesting on this site are all the articles concerned with sidewalks, vrowding and other rather minor issues. Where is the article that lets readers know that Patterson Mill posted some of the top scores on a wide variety of tests last year, placing them in the top 3-5% of schools statewide. Sure, you can complain about overcrowding, but in the end the question should be is your child getting a quality education? Isn’t that really what makes a good school?
School administrators now say there is no shortage of lockers at Patterson Mill. The figures originally given to me by the principal did show a shortfall, but in a recent e-mail he said the staff has since done a physical count and there are 1908 hallway lockers in the school, which is well over the state-rated capacity of 1763.