The Board is considering reconfiguring schools to move 9th grade to high schools and 6th grade to middle schools as a strategic way to ensure all schools meet the Board's established "Robust School Criteria".

The rationale for these changes centers on the following key objectives:

1. Enhancing Student Opportunities

The Board believes that schools with "robust" enrollment sizes are better equipped to provide a high-quality educational experience. Benefits include:

Student Choice and Flexibility: Larger enrollment numbers support a wider variety of course offerings, electives, and extracurricular programs.
Healthy Collaborative Environments: Reconfiguration ensures that schools have a sufficient number of teachers per grade or subject to collaborate effectively in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs).
Specialized Support Staff: Achieving robust sizes allows the district to efficiently allocate support staff such as counselors, instructional coaches, and psychologists.

2. Making High Schools More Robust

Adding 9th graders to a high school (transitioning to a 9–12 configuration) provides several structural and educational benefits intended to make schools more "robust and thriving."

Sustaining Robust Enrollment Levels
- Avoiding Closures: Under the current 10–12 model, enrollment at some high schools is projected to fall below the Board's "robust" minimum of 1,400 students by 2030. Moving 9th grade to high school would result in an average enrollment of 1,757 students per school, allowing the district to maintain all existing high schools without needing to close one.
- Optimal School Size: A 9–12 configuration fits the Board's established optimal size range of 1,500–2,200 students.
2. Enhanced Student Opportunities and Resources
- Increased Choice and Flexibility: Larger enrollment numbers directly contribute to greater student choice and schedule flexibility.
- Economies of Scale: Robust school sizes allow for better economies of scale, making it easier to provide sufficient support staff, such as administrators, counselors, and instructional coaches.
- Broader Social Networks: Higher populations contribute to broader social networks for students and greater community cohesion.
3. Academic and Extracurricular Advantages
- Streamlined Learning: Adding 9th grade allows students earlier and more direct access to the comprehensive offerings of a high school, including Career and Technical Education (CTE), World Languages, and Performing or Visual Arts.
- Advanced Opportunities: Students can begin participating in high school-level athletics and high-level academic programs like Advanced Placement (AP) and Concurrent Enrollment (CE) a year earlier.
- Clearer Pathways: The reconfiguration supports the goal of having "pure feeders," where students transition more predictably through the district's levels.
4. Teacher Collaboration
- Healthy Professional Environments: The Board's robust criteria emphasize that every teacher should have peers to help provide the best teaching and constantly improve. A 9–12 model provides a larger faculty, increasing the likelihood that teachers have more on-site colleagues for collaboration in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs).
Preliminary survey data suggests the community recognizes these benefits, with 63% of respondents expressing support for moving 9th grade to high school.

3. Addressing Declining Enrollment

Timpanogos School District is experiencing a significant enrollment decline. This is primarily connected to declining birth rates, but housing affordability and increasing school-choice options also play a role.

The 6-8 Shift: Moving 6th grade out of elementary schools and into middle schools helps manage this decline while boosting middle school populations toward their robust target of 1,200–1,400 students.
Elementary Thresholds: This reconfiguration helps keep elementary schools within their optimal robust size of 590–980 students (for K-6) or 495–825 students (for K-5).