Grace Episcopal Day School expanding to full middle school

School officials announced their plans June 1 to add seventh-grade classes by the 2008-09 school year, and eighth grade by 2009-10.

Carol Franek, head of the school, said it was time to expand, as the demand has increased for the additional classes.

‘‘When we go to an eighth grade, then we open up many more options for the students,” Franek said.

Currently, the school goes from nursery school to sixth grade. After sixth grade, parents of Grace Episcopal students typically choose a middle school for two years before shifting again to a high school, or enroll their children in a private school.

But many parents want to keep their children in Grace Episcopal until eighth grade, and more each year want to send their kids to the private school, according to Franek.

The existing school, located at 9411 Connecticut Ave., Kensington, will be renovated starting next summer.

The school will not build out to include the new classrooms, but rather will renovate the interior and convert offices into classrooms. Four more classrooms would hold, at most, 18 students each.

‘‘Actually, they’re being converted back,” Franek said. ‘‘They were converted from classrooms to offices [in 1968].”

The plans are still being drawn up by architects at Cox Graae & Spack in Washington, D.C., and are not final.

Parents are thrilled that Grace Episcopal in Kensington is expanding to a full middle school, and many plan to keep their rising sixth-grade students there through the eighth grade.

‘‘I have become a strong supporter of the [kindergarten] through eighth grade model,” said Valerie Wooldridge, parent of a fifth-grader. ‘‘In that kind of a model, it’s such a better place for the kids to be rather than be in a new environ in such a difficult time in their life.”

Wooldridge and other parents said the continuity of staying in the same school from kindergarten through middle school would be better for students.

‘‘Rather than starting in sixth grade somewhere new where they don’t know my kids, they’re coming from a place where they’ve known your kids all those years,” she said. ‘‘In [my son’s] class, which is fairly small, there are five kids that have been there since nursery school, which in this area is not the norm.”

Grace Episcopal began as a nursery program in 1960, and quickly gained support from parents and added first through sixth grades in 1968 at the former Larchmont Public School in Kensington, Franek said.

The nursery program and kindergarten classes are still held at the 9115 Georgia Ave., Silver Spring.

The first day of eighth grade would coincide with the 65th anniversary of the school, Franek said.

Franek said the seventh- and eighth-graders would be given chances to mentor the younger students, or go on service trips. Teachers and school officials plan to meet this summer to start planning a seventh and eighth grade curriculum that fits with the school’s sixth-grade education.

‘‘I was really pleased that Grace was going to continue through middle school,” said Andre Marshall, father of a rising sixth-grader at Grace. ‘‘There are so many changes going on in their lives at that time, so having that environment that they’re familiar with is so important.”

Marshall, of University Park in Prince George’s County, said he looked at other schools that had a seventh and eighth grade, but his family was willing to face the eventual transition — and lengthy commute — because of the school’s faculty and community.

According to Franek and the school’s Web site, more than one-third of the 250 students at Grace are not Caucasian or are foreign nationals, and approximately two-thirds of the families practice faiths other than Episcopalian.

‘‘One of the key cultural things that Grace has it that it’s very unpretentious, very low key,” Broome said on Thursday. ‘‘It’s great they have small classes and the most diversity of students of anywhere in [Montgomery] county.”