For 30 years, Helena High’s English department operated under a longstanding and well-established writing program. This school year, for the first time, the significant writing/Bengal Writing Program has ended. The elimination of the program highlights the tension many schools experience between curricular decisions and the realities of funding education.
The significant writing program is a statewide Board of Public Education accreditation standard aimed at increasing student writing opportunities and performance. Section 10.55.713 of Chapter 55 of the Administrative Rules of Montana states, “Teachers with a significant writing program, as determined by the local board of trustees, shall have a maximum load of 100 students.” This means that school districts can create their own interpretation of the purposefully loose word “significant.”
At Helena High, the significant writing program equated to an average of 20 students per English class. Without this standard, the state limit is 30 students per class, or 150 students per teacher.
History
The Helena School District chose to adopt the OPI program in the 1994-1995 school year, requiring teachers to assign two processed pieces of work quarterly, eight pieces in all for students. The pieces went through a lengthy process of brainstorming, outlining, submitting drafts for teacher feedback, and lastly, submitting revised drafts, which also received teacher feedback.
Jan Clinard, former Montana Office of Public Instruction (OPI) English arts specialist, helped to create the statewide standard in 1989. She envisioned significant writing to be implemented in any department. In a recent interview with The Nugget, she explained that the details of each program were determined by each individual school. Thus, whether school districts wanted significant writing used in their history curriculum or even by a single teacher, it was entirely up to them.
The program was adopted in many other school districts across the state such as Bozeman, Butte, Great Falls, Kalispell, and Missoula.
Even before the establishment of the statewide accreditation standard, Helena High already had limited the number of students per English class starting in the early 1980s, according to interviews of former HHS Principal Pete Carparelli and former HHS English Department Chair David Cooper. These interviews were conducted by HHS English teacher Jill Van Alstyne in December 2009.
Mr. Carparelli said that prior to implementing the program, English teachers had student loads of 135 to 140 students. However, he said that educational research at the time revealed the importance of in-depth writing instruction and indicated that smaller class sizes were necessary for such time-consuming instruction of students and evaluation of their writing.
“We were a team of people that believed that,” Mr. Carparelli said in the 2009 interview. “There was no doubt that we needed to have more writing going on. You can’t do this if you have thirty kids a period, or twenty-eight.”
As English Department chair at the time, Mr. Cooper oversaw the implementation of this program.
Retired Helena High AP Literature and Creative Writing teacher Mr. Geoff Proctor, who taught at HHS for 28 years, stated in a feature opinion piece for the Helena Independent Record in 2000 that “For writing instruction to be effective, manageable class size is critical.”
Longtime HHS English teacher Jeff Sykes, who attended Helena High School as a student while the significant writing program was in place, noted how helpful the program was in setting him up for college and organizing his success. He said that classes like English 101 would not have been as accessible for him if not for the writing instruction he gained from the significant writing program. He also noted that, with the program in place, “gains were substantial” for students, and that the program also provided accountability for teachers.
Ending of program
But over the past 15 years, the program experienced what Mr. Proctor refers to as a “gradual erosion.” In 2005, numbers were allowed to increase to 23 students in a class rather than the average of 20; however, the total number of students per English teacher could not exceed 100. This information comes from the implementation guidelines of the significant writing program for the Helena Public School District.
In 2014, the administration proposed ending the significant writing program: “Elimination of OPI’s Significant Writing designation allowing for the ability to reallocate resources within the master schedule to better meet cross curricular writing requirements,” stated the recommendation. The goal of the replacement program was to create an “intensive writing program that adheres to the mandated Montana State Standards requirement of writing across all disciplines and develops a 6-12 writing framework following best practices” as stated by the agenda of a school board meeting in May of 2014.
The proposal would have eliminated the 100-student cap per teacher; however, the school board’s tie vote meant that no action was taken, and the significant writing program was not eliminated. The Nugget has reached out to current administrators for comment.
Later, when the district again questioned whether to keep the program in place, Mr. Sykes was a prominent figure in fighting for its continuation. “There was always a discussion to get rid of it [the program], not what to replace it with,” he noted. As the chair of the English department at the time, Mr. Sykes felt the need to protect members in his department.
Things wouldn’t significantly change for the program until 2017, when an accreditation issue led to the district replacing the official significant writing program for an HHS-only “Bengal Writing Program” model that had the same writing requirements, but with more flexibility in class numbers. That three-year program was renewed in 2020 for another three years.
HHS English and Literacy Instructional Coach Meghan Schulte, also an English teacher at Helena High, noted that “When the budget shifted in the district, the school either had to increase class sizes or hire more teachers. Superintendents had to decide whether to hold teachers to a difficult standard because they can no longer guarantee class size being capped at 100 or allow us [teachers] to make the choice of how much writing we require and have the flexibility with the schedule.
“The school and staff agreed to start unchecking the OPI accreditation box and create their own iteration of the program to hold the same standards in place.”
By the 2023-2024 school year, the Helena School District was facing an extreme budget crisis, and the Bengal Writing Program was not renewed. Currently, English teachers for each grade level decide how many writing pieces to assign for the year, and teachers are no longer held to requiring two process pieces per quarter.
Perspectives
As a result of the program’s erosion, differing opinions and perspectives have been voiced by the school community.
Mr. Sykes stated that he disagrees with the idea that “students are better at writing by doing less writing.” Though the original program required more writing assignments, it also provided the time to do so.
Mr. Proctor noted that “if there is not a standard, where is the incentive?”
Mrs. Schulte noted that the program “was heavy” for teachers. “It was a lot to try and fit that in, and I found myself—especially with the sophomores—spending two weeks on an essay.” With two formal essays being assigned a quarter, she would end up spending four weeks of a nine-week quarter working on essays. This didn’t give much time allotted for other key elements of English instruction.
Mrs. Schulte said, “There were ways that I felt we could do a better job and make it still authentic for the kids that wasn’t such a heavy burden on us.” She went on to say, “We were doing a lot of the heavy lifting as teachers.”
Jan Clinard explained that the state accreditation standard does not define actual writing requirements; that is up to each district. Thus, in her professional opinion, the Helena district could have retained a significant writing program with different requirements.
Mrs. Schulte noted, “We really all wanted the kids to get lots of practice with writing, to go through the practice of formal writing frequently enough that they got used to it . . . but not so much that we couldn’t teach all the other things we had to teach.”
Mr. Sykes agreed that students need lots of writing practice. But he added that there is a “big difference between assigning vs teaching writing.”
“The pressure of having to get eight essays done being lifted has provided teachers a little bit more breathing room, and now they can provide more authentic actionable feedback and more frequent,” Mrs. Schulte noted. Giving students the ability to break down essays and develop them individually is a large and principal element of the curriculum.
As of this year, Mrs. Schulte said, “I think the writing is more connected to what they’re teaching in class. The writing is more embedded with the reading . . . that’s where it’s actually more impactful.” She went on to say, “I think [students] understand the objective pieces of writing more than years past. However, I think there are too many outside factors that we can’t control that have impacted their writing as well.” She noted the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent online school, as well as social media, as a few elements.
Mrs. Schulte even noted that the writing that English teachers at the junior level have seen is “so much better than they’ve seen in years past.”
In contrast, Mr. Sykes finds that current student performance without a writing program results in “writing [that] is not as strong as I’ve seen in the past.”
“All English teachers want to continue teaching the process of writing,” said Mrs. Schulte, and they will continue to do so no matter their situation, she indicated.
“Responding to an administrative talking point “what gets measured, gets done,” Mr. Proctor stated at the 2014 Helena School Board meeting that “there is no better, more consistent, more demonstrable, measurable, fully broad-reaching, and long-term program example in our district than our Significant Writing Program at Helena High.”
Summary
Change to curriculum structure can often create a strain on professional educators as well as students. Any time budgets enter the education discussion, there’s always the potential for a new level of strain. In times of transition, how to maintain quality curriculum and instruction will continue to be up for debate in this and other educational programs.
