By Kerri Pepoy,Staff Writer

NORWAY – Three Norway couples hope to launch an alternative middle school for seventh-graders in the Oxford Hills by September 2006 that will offer a curriculum focused on the interests and natural abilities of students.

And if the program is successful and there is enough community interest, eighth-graders will be included the following academic year, said Carl Costanzi and Kate Herlihy, two parents involved with the effort.

The alternative program will be completely run by parents, they said Thursday. The three couples have a total of four children in sixth grade at Guy E. Rowe Elementary School who plan to enter the program in September.

The couples are Costanzi and his wife, Carolyn, Herlihy and her husband, Jack Laliberte, and Kathy and David Newcomb.

Parents will be steeped in all aspects of the school including curriculum development, some classroom instruction, acting as teacher aides, coordinating field trips and fundraising.

Costanzi and Herlihy said the program is not an indictment of public school, but rather a way to provide students with more focused attention and parents with opportunities to be actively engaged in their child’s education.

“The middle school is limited by what they can do simply by their size,” Costanzi said. “We are interested in progressive education, where the teacher is removed from the center and the student is put in the center. Students would be generating discussion rather than the teacher controlling the discussion.”

The school does not have a location yet nor does it have funds. Herlihy said the school would be supported by tuition, which will probably be about $5,000 to $7,000 per year, and fundraising. But there have been “multiple applicants” for the one teacher position, she said.

Herlihy said the applicants are not all certified teachers, but they have an educational background that qualifies them to instruct middle-school students.

The three couples held a meeting last December for interested parents and the response was not what they hoped for – only three or four parents attended, Herlihy said. But the group plans to do more advertising, and only a few more students are needed to launch the school. “We’re looking for 10,” Costanzi said.

If successful, the school would be similar to the Boxberry School, an small independent elementary school in Oxford that blends the arts, creative thinking and traditional academics. Herlihy said the group is exploring an arrangement with Boxberry where the middle school might use its location on Webber Brook Road, although other options are being considered.

The curriculum would include traditional subjects including math, foreign language and social studies but would focus on students’ interests. “We’re going to talk to them about what they would like to do, what projects they would like to create,” Costanzi said.

Costanzi said projects will integrate material from different academic subjects. For example, he said, a theme about Africa would discuss all facets of a continent including history, language, geography and culture. “All of those subject matters can get integrated into that,” he said. There would be “hands-on” projects as well that incorporate environmental awareness such as possibly building a greenhouse that would apply math and science skills.

Mark Eastman, superintendent of SAD 17, has met with the parents and said the alternative middle school would receive support from Oxford Hills Middle School when it is unable to offer certain academic subjects.

“Their vision is interesting,” he said. “We will allow them to access our programming such as music or advanced course work or foreign language.”

Eastman said it will be challenging for one teacher to meet different learning needs. “Kids have a lot of needs; schooling is very complex and it’s very difficult for a single teacher to meet those needs,” he said. But, he added, “my sense is they are a student-parent group that is motivated academically.”