Current Moon Area School District kindergarten students will be making history at age 10, becoming the first fifth-grade class to attend the district's middle school.

School directors approved the measure on Monday by a 5-4 vote, bypassing what many thought would be elementary-wide redistricting for next school year.

"From what I have heard from (district superintendent) Donna Milanovich, consultants and parents with (elementary) school age children, there will be educational advantages (attained) by putting fifth-graders into the middle school," said Mark Ulven, directors' vice president and elementary student parent.

For the 2012-13 school year, approximately 280 to 300 fifth-grade students will switch from their neighborhood elementary schools -- Allard, Bon Meade, Brooks, Hyde and McCormick -- after attending kindergarten through fourth grade.

Upon the completion of the secondary schools renovation plan in about five years, the new middle school will house fifth through eighth grades.

The current kindergarten class has 180 students, but that number will jump when those students start first-grade as Moon does not offer full-day kindergarten.

Given the measure's timing, designing the building for four grades and roughly 1,200 students, instead of three grades and approximately 900 students, is not a problem, said Jeffrey Foreman of Eckles Architecture.

"We can merge it in just fine with the project. We don't anticipate any problems." Unlike the nearly completed high school designs, middle school creation is in the beginning stages.

District officials can design the building to keep fifth and sixth-graders from interacting too much with more mature seventh and eighth-grade students, said Foreman.

"Through the design of the building and the scheduling of classes, we will effectively be able to separate them."

Moving fifth-graders allows more flexibility for the future and frees space for full-day kindergarten students and possibly pre-kindergarten students, said Milanovich.

"We were looking for a solution that would suit our community. It was really something we saw as feasible. A lot of studies have shown that fifth-graders are a lot more like sixth, seventh and eighth-graders than elementary students."

Creating a compartmentalized middle school could add as much as $5.5 million dollars to the secondary schools project, bringing the current high school building's renovation to $41.5 million, said Dan Engen of Eckles Architecture.

That cost includes adding additions to the building to teach the same number of grades it currently holds, a move that school director Mark Limbruner questioned.

The high school is undersized for the student population now, and the space needs to be specific to the age groups taught, said Engen.

"It's a common thing done in school design. We want to create an environment that is (appealing) and at the proper scale for kids coming into it.

"It will be a different design from high school to middle school, whether fifth-grade is in it or not."

Building more space is redundant and could prove harmful to specific neighborhoods in the long run, said school director Jeff Bussard.

"If we move our fifth grade, we weaken our (neighborhood) schools. There is no guarantee we will not lose one of our schools. It's almost a set up. One of them has got to go. We are not growing by leaps and bounds."

A closure would save around $8 million for future renovation and yearly operating costs, while possibly bringing in outside money to the district by contracting out the building.

Though Hyde and Allard were mentioned in the past as outdated schools that could be closed instead of renovated by Education Management Group, the district's redistricting consultant, that decision is years away, said Milanovich.

"We don't know what the future is going to hold. What a future board will choose to do, I don't know. All I know is that is not the direction right now."

Still, a possible closure, extra money and the grade pairings were enough issues for minority directors Carol Cellini, Ben Bonham, Limbruner and Bussard, to oppose the measure.

"We are making a huge mistake here. You are placing this community at a great risk," Bussard said.

Others in the crowd, including redistricting committee member Jerry Testa, felt the measure, recommended by the majority of the 55 committee members, was a fitting solution for Moon and Crescent communities.

"We are looking to provide the best educational resources, keep neighborhood schools and doing the best we can do with what we have. As a committee, this was the path we chose to take," Testa said.