REIDSVILLE – One of the innovative approaches the Moss Street Partnership School uses is to ignore arbitrary distinctions of what grade a child is in.

Over and over, school officials declare, “We meet students where they are.”

“We don’t teach third grade here.  We don’t teach kindergarten or first grade.  We teach kids,” Christina O’Connor of the UNCG School of Education says in the accompanying video.

It doesn’t make much sense, O’Connor says, to think a child born Aug. 30 knows much more than a child born Sept. 1 – or that a child born the following July knows as much as a child born in September.

So at Moss Street, first- and second-graders are grouped together in multi-age classrooms.

“The multi-age classes are our way of starting to try to break down those ideas about, ‘A child should be able to do X’ because their birthday happened to fall in this arbitrary set of dates,” she says, “and focus more on what they can do and what they need to do next in order to succeed.”