Early Mornings, Despite Research

Early+Mornings%2C+Despite+Research

This article is part of the Ask the Principal series  featuring real questions from PR students.

How come school starts at 7:25 despite the research against it?
A very high profile district, Stevenson High School, just made the switch. They are kind of breaking ground there. I don’t have an answer for you. It starts when it starts because it starts then. We are one of the earliest, if not the earliest district in the state. No one is starting as late as Stevenson is yet. But the brain research that we have on teenagers suggests that you don’t start that early. Other factors that could complicate it would be all the extracurriculars. We share transportation with our feeder districts. There are a lot of other pieces that we would have to look at and alter if we scooted the day later.

People like yourself with a lot of homework and such, I don’t know if you do some in the morning, but if school moves that much later, then your extracurriculars end that much later, then it is that much later by the time you get to start your homework. Then if you are up till 2 A.M. — it defeats the purpose of a later start time, anyways. I am not saying I wouldn’t be in support of it, it would seem to align with the research that’s out there. I am very interested to watch the Stevenson experiment and see how that goes.

Do you think our district would ever move back the start time?
Sure. That decision rests with the Board of Education. That is not anything that we could decide locally here. The Board governs our four buildings in the district: Central, South, Cary-Grove, and PR. They’re locally elected officials. The administration would make a recommendation to them, like the principals and our central office administration would make a recommendation. Ultimately it would be The Board that would decide if we were to move that or not. The Board has made changes in the best interest of students many times. Who knows what they would say?

Another question that came from a PR student asked whether three day weekends could be a possibility.
If we were to do something like three day weekends, it would lengthen the school year because we have to have a certain number of school days. I don’t know if folks are aware of that trade off. So, is it a possibility? I suppose so, as long as we are still getting in the school days that we need.

Testing doesn’t drive what we do at all, but it is important, especially with a lot of our students looking at competitive colleges. A concern that I would have is [whether you would] have enough schooling prior to your ACT test or your AP test. Would you be able to score as well as you want or need to get into those competitive colleges? So that would be an unfortunate reality we would have to look at if we wanted to do that.

What time should school start?

  • 8:00 (32%, 20 Votes)
  • 8:30 (30%, 19 Votes)
  • 9:00 (21%, 13 Votes)
  • 7:30 (17%, 11 Votes)

Total Voters: 63

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