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06/12/2018 12:00 AMThe decision will be made in July. After a lengthy public hearing in May and years of discussions about moving back the Guilford High School (GHS) start time, the Board of Education (BOE) decided at its June 11 meeting to wait a few more weeks on a final decision on start times—start times that now look a little bit different than what was discussed at the public hearing.
The board commissioned a task force to look at the issue of changing start times in the district and, at the public hearing, the task force put forward a suggestion that could be implemented this September 2018 at no cost.
The suggestion would push the first bell at GHS back from 7:25 a.m. to 7:40 a.m. The plan is made possible by changing high school bus runs, shaving five minutes out of all the passing periods in the day, and sliding all of the schools in the district back by 10 minutes. GHS would start at 7:40 a.m. and let out at 2:18 p.m., the middle schools would start at 8:10 a.m. and let out at 2:50 p.m., and the elementary schools would start at 9:10 a.m. and let out at 3:35 p.m. under the suggestion.
At the public hearing and in subsequent communications to the BOE, parents expressed serious concerns over what a 10-minute push would mean to elementary school students, staff, and parents. Superintendent of Schools Paul Freeman said having to slide the elementary schools back would exacerbate what he sees as an already-too-late-running day, but that would be the price of gaining 15 minutes at the high school.
At the June 11 BOE meeting, BOE Chair Bill Bloss said a member of the taskforce had fleshed out a possible compromise that would still have the high school start 15 minutes later and the middle schools 10 minutes later, but start the elementary schools only 5 minutes later so that the elementary day would start at 9:05 a.m. and end at 3:30 p.m.
“After four or five years of talking about this topic, this seems to me to be the best solution and the most palatable compromise that we have come up with to date,” said Freeman.
However, sliding the elementary schools back by just five minutes is going to put a strain on the bus system. The district is starting with a new bus company this year and a new routing software system; while Freeman said right now it looks like a five minute shift is possible, the community needs to understand that he can’t guarantee it.
“If the board decides in response to the concerns that we have heard to make a five-minute slide at the elementary level, we will do everything within our power to meet that expectation,” he said. “However bus runs are just funny and I have to stop short of saying I know we can meet that time frame until we have modeled it out and whether it involves making some modifications after the school year has opened and if it involves putting another bus or two on the road, which would incur costs that we have tried to avoid.”
Freeman said currently six buses go to each elementary school and sometimes struggle to arrive on time even now. Under the new company, he believes there will be greater efficiency, but also said he wants to be cautious about those efficiencies. Freeman recently spoke to a representative from the Greenwich school system, which went to a much later start time last year and has encountered issues.
“Essentially [Greenwich] brought in an outside consultant and they worked on finding efficiencies in their bus system,” he said. “They worked to run the system more smoothly and it looked great on paper and then they found out when they ran the system they simply were not able to meet the published pick-up and drop-off times. To fix that system, they ended up returning some of the buses to the road that they thought would be savings to offset the overall costs.”
BOE members pointed out that possibly having to add buses into the system mid-year could be very costly, even in the six-figure range, and a challenge in a fixed budget. Freeman said he and the administration would do everything in their power to make the five-minute elementary shift work if that is what the board decides, but that the community just needs to be aware that there could be some challenges in the first year.
Bloss said the board would wait until July to make a decision to give staff more time to work with the busing software and see if they could become more confident with a 5-minute shift verse a 10-minute shift at the elementary level. Bloss said he also wants to give the community some time to think about and respond to this proposal, as it is an adjustment from what was initially proposed.
In considering this variation of the proposal, Bloss said the community needs to keep some facts in mind, mainly that the BOE understands the science behind the call for later start times for high school students and is trying to do right by all students in the district. He said due to limits on what can be achieved with start times in Guilford when considering sports, busing, staff, costs, and numerous other factors, an 8:30 a.m. start at the high school is not happening.
“It’s simply not possible,” he said. “It’s not an aspiration goal, it’s not a practical goal, it’s not a feasible goal. It’s not going to happen. Period. I am sorry; it would be great if it could, but it’s not, so we need to move past that.”
Furthermore, when considering this proposal, the community should understand that there is no win-win solution when it comes to changing start times. This is going to be a cost-benefit analysis according to Bloss.
“There is a collateral consequence to everything that we have looked at and I am absolutely convinced that there is no way to get 15 minutes extra for high school start times with no impact on anyone else,” he said. “I have had some flattering emails saying, ‘You guys have done such a great job figuring stuff out, how come you can’t figure this out?’ Because there isn’t a solution that has no impact on somebody else. I can’t say it more clearly than that.”
With the BOE considering the proposal with only a five-minute change at the elementary level, Freeman said it also needs to be clear that this is going to be the change; this is not phase one of two.
“I think the community does understand that we make changes and then we study those changes and sometimes we have to refine and modify those changes,” he said. “We can’t say this is year one of a two-year plan and we haven’t even started to sketch out what year two is going to look like because those are big unknowns.”
The BOE will make a decision on school start times at its next regular meeting, Monday, July 9 at 7:30 p.m. at Guilford High School.