It has become the trend in Butler County that school districts tinker with the configuration of the grades in an attempt to bring up Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) scores. Butler School District is trying to tinker with its schools in the same way.

It begs the question: Is changing the grade configurations going to improve education?

Go online to www.paschool-performance.org and compare the different schools in the county. The website rates each school’s academic performance. A perfect score is a 100. The numbers translate into grades such as an A (90-l00), B (80-90) and so on. The most recent ratings available are for the 2013-2014 school year.

Looking at our neighbors, you see varying results. Seneca Valley went with the K-4 configuration, and its results are mixed. Connoquenessing Valley Elementary received an A. Rowan Elementary got a C-plus. Evans City Elementary is a B and Haine is a B-plus.

Mars School District broke down its elementary schools to K-l, 2-4 and 5-6. It got an A for all three schools. Slippery Rock School broke down its grades to K-5 and 6-8. Both elementary schools and the middle school have a C rating.

I can only conclude that tinkering with the configuration does not in and of itself improve education.

In the Butler School District, there is a wide range of ratings between the 11 elementary schools, which currently are K-6. Center Township Elementary received an A, and Emily Brittain Elementary received a D.

Is reconfiguring our elementary schools away from K-6 the magic solution that brings all of our schools up to an A? Or is tinkering with the grade configurations just a trend which distracts us from the real variables that affect education? I wish all our consolidation meetings over the past few months would have been about how we could improve the academic performance of our current K-6 schools, rather than about how we can fit 27 kids in a classroom at the soon-to-be former junior high building.