NASHUA, NH – The Board of Education on Monday discussed middle school redistricting enrollment and team projections on Monday night.
For the 2025 school year, it is projected that there will be 2,024 middle school students with 717 at Pennichuck, 638 at Fairgrounds, and 669 at McCarthy with the boundary line set at the Nashua River.
In the new school year starting in the fall, all the middle schools will be standardized to four-person teams with six periods instead of seven periods. This will allow for longer classes and establish consistency across the schools, the board determined.
“Forty-eight minutes just doesn’t provide enough time,” Sharon Coffey, principal at Fairgrounds Middle School said about the seven-period school days. “This way you’re going to be able to get a lot more done during the period.”
Gabriel Falzarano, principal at Pennichuck Middle School, added that changing to six periods will cut down transition times by about 14 percent. This will also help with those entering middle school who are used to having one to three teachers a day, and eighth graders going to high school, where there are four periods.
Elm Street Middle School principal Katrina Esparza says the change will create more equitable experiences for students.
“When we’re talking about our unified arts programs and our foreign language programs, [we want to] make sure that all of our students have access to that and the schedules that we have right now do not provide access to all our students,” she said. “It’s been happening for so long that … [we’ve been] keeping people from being culinary masters, we’re keeping people from learning that they love the stem programs and those are the pieces that we want to make sure they have and that they understand as they’re moving towards high school.”