Several changes are coming to the middle school at R. Roger Rowe School in the 2025-26 school year, geared toward making the most of the instructional day and strengthening student-teacher relationships. At the May 13 Rancho Santa Fe School District board meeting, Principal Lindsey Conley shared more about the schedule adjustments that will add additional time for science, history, math and semester-based electives.
Per the new schedule, instructional blocks on Tuesday through Friday will increase from 80 minutes to 95 minutes, and Monday will be a seven-period day rather than a nine-period day. A tightened-up structure includes a new comprehensive English language arts course, combining reading and writing into one new class, which allows the school to add minutes to other instructional areas across the day.
The middle school day will also now begin with a re-imagined advisory period called Eagle Time. During Eagle Time, a total of 30 minutes on Tuesday through Friday, Conley said students will have a chance to build their relationships with staff and peers first thing in the morning and get ready to start the day.
The period will also provide an opportunity for all Rowe students to gather as a K-8 community, a link that Conley said some parents feel has been missing.
For the last few years, the district and board have talked extensively about ways to improve the middle school.
“I think the schedule is the place that we start,” Conley said. “I’m not going to profess to it being perfect because we haven’t tried it. What I have heard a lot is this idea of a need for connectedness, a need for community, a need for belonging.”
During the district’s work crafting a new mission and vision statement, former students who are now in high schools gave input on the need for better relationships with the grown-ups on campus. Conley believes that with the new schedule, teachers will be less rushed and there will be more time to connect with students during core content areas: “It gives us the space in which to build that connectedness and build those relationships and really get to know kids and get kids what they need.”
At the May 13 meeting, both board and istrative staff reported they received quite a few letters and calls from parents who were concerned about the changes.
Conley said it was unfortunate as some of the information that parents were reacting to was not accurate and some things weren’t intended to be shared publicly before the meeting. Over the last week, Rowe held informational meetings on the changes for both incoming sixth grade parents and current sixth and seventh grade parents.
Board member Annette Ross said that parents were most upset about combining reading and writing into one class, a change from the school’s practice for the last 15 years.
“What I was hearing was that a lot of people felt that having reading and writing separate was something special that we offered,” Ross said. “The perception is that something is being taken away.”
Conley said the goal of having one comprehensive English language arts class versus separate reading and writing blocks was to have cohesion in the instruction and more consistency with teacher-student relationships which could result in stronger assessments of individual student needs.
The move toward maximizing time in all instructional areas was also driven by the school’s performance on state assessment tests.
The district’s California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress scores in math have been an area of weakness for the middle school: in 2024, there was a decline in the percentage of students meeting or exceeding the standards. As Superintendent Kim Pinkerton said, the science test scores were also markedly below their standards of expectation. In 2024, eighth graders dropped to 47% proficient or advanced in science down from 77% in 2023.
“This is one of the reasons that we are moving toward more time in the core instructional areas,” Pinkerton said. “We want to be a data-driven school and the data is telling us we need some more time.”
In his comments, board President Jee Manghani said he liked the idea of combining ELA if it meant time could be used more efficiently across all of the subjects.
As board Vice President Kerry Vinci noted, change is never easy. He wanted to assure that the staff had been involved in the planning and development of these strategies as their buy-in will be important in order for the new schedule to be successfully implemented.
“Depending on who you talk to there might be concerns about different areas of the schedule,” Conley said. “It’s not something that I believe we could’ve accomplished with 100 percent consensus because of the fact that it’s change. But I think there was an awareness that it was happening and there was this desire to really take a look at the middle school schedule and try to maximize some opportunities.”
