Smaller classes better, district says

On a recent morning at the year-round Central Elementary School, Michael Stanley passed out poetry journals to his kindergartners and started making the rounds to assist the young writers. “A good writer always practices her sentences first,” he told Anette Hernandez-Diaz, a 6-year-old who was stuck on how to start a poem about the beach. “Now, what do you want to write? Say it out loud.”