Good News from the City on Two Tier Busing
From Liza Rankin at Soup for Teachers:
It's a go!
The city is giving $2.3M for us to move to 2 tiers from the Families and Ed Levy, and also giving $300,000 or so to fund crossing guards at 100+ locations around the city! It still needs to be officially adopted by the Levy Oversight Committee and council, but that's a formality. They are all for it!
That seems to mean two tiers, one at 8 am and one at 9 am.
Rankin says in another comment that PTA and Soup for Teachers advocacy helped get this done for SPS families.
No tweets or website announcement yet from SPS.
It's a go!
The city is giving $2.3M for us to move to 2 tiers from the Families and Ed Levy, and also giving $300,000 or so to fund crossing guards at 100+ locations around the city! It still needs to be officially adopted by the Levy Oversight Committee and council, but that's a formality. They are all for it!
That seems to mean two tiers, one at 8 am and one at 9 am.
Rankin says in another comment that PTA and Soup for Teachers advocacy helped get this done for SPS families.
No tweets or website announcement yet from SPS.
Comments
flip back
MS and HS will end too late.
-LM
Finding a schedule that is perfect for everyone is simply impossible; there are many individual variables; some teens are larks, but they are a small minority and creating a schedule for a tiny minority does not make sense to me. Flip back wants an 8 am high school start- I would ask how do you reconcile that with the American Association of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association and the Nurse's Association recommendation (among many other groups) that adolescents start school no earlier than 8:30? There is tons of evidence that teens need a lot of sleep, that their internal clock changes during adolescence and then changes back in adulthood. We are giving our kids the best chance at learning higher math, graduating, and letting them avoid the risk taking behaviors, car accidents, diabetes and other serious negative impacts associated with inadequate sleep. Can creativity and initiative be used to mitigate for kids who are losing something due to the schedule? Of course! Perhaps the next effort will be for City funding of more lighted sports fields.
Krab
-puzzled
A 9am start time for High School may make it easier to have sports practices in the mornings...?
QA Parent
- MemoReader
-HS Parent
I would ask how do you reconcile that with the American Association of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association and the Nurse's Association recommendation (among many other groups) that adolescents start school no earlier than 8:30?
Physical activity and organized sports are also an important part of a student's wellbeing. Improved mental function, lower risk of diabetes, and all that. Sports practice in the morning? Kind of defeats the point of the late start, huh? Part of the issue is getting to games and meets. Students will now have to miss even more school to participate in sports. Students will have fewer daylight hours to practice. Working students have even fewer hours available for afterschool jobs. Students are not getting more sleep. There are still the same number of hours in the day. The day has just been forcibly shifted.
(the proposed times are part of a January Board meeting where 2016-17 transportation standards were approved)
flip back
MS/HS - Arrive 8:45; Start 9:00; End 3:50; Depart 4:00
ES - Arrive 7:45; Start 8:00; End 2:30; Depart 2:40
Middle school/High school will be ending a full 90 minutes later than last school year. That's a huge shift.
flip back
See my This and That thread with a story about later start times for one district (re: Athletics). As well, later starts have shown to be linked to fewer injuries to athletes.
And, for hopefully the last time, school is overwhelmingly for academics.
seriously
Why cant they have 8 am start time in high school, but have first period be PE, music or dance?
"Foster said his athletic department has a budget, but it’s minimal and transportation is the biggest expense. Due to changed start times for classes this year, all of his teams have to use private charter buses to games, which can cost $900 versus $150 when the normal school buses were used."
http://www.seattletimes.com/sports/high-school/rainier-beach-baseball-team-did-some-fundraising-to-build-whole-new-program-establish-pride/
Sleeper
For any kind of life outside of high school.
-seeking balance
Second, kids who start school before 8:30 aren't just tired during first period. They're sleep deprived all day. It's getting up too early that is the problem not the subject covered in first period.
It does seem that the transportation budget should take into account the cost of getting teams to games - assuming other extracurricular activities have similar budgets.
Helen
http://yvpc.sph.umich.edu/participation-high-school-sports-lowers-major-crime/
A new study from the University of Kansas that analyzed academic performance of athletes and nonathletes across Kansas shows that participation in interscholastic athletics is often associated with better educational outcomes...'As such, participation should be encouraged, especially for high-risk populations, and specifically for minority students'
https://news.ku.edu/2014/01/15/study-shows-high-school-athletes-performed-better-school-persisted-graduation-more-non
...students who participated more often in team sports or general exercise were less likely to use cigarettes, marijuana, and other illicit drugs than other high school seniors.
http://www.seenmagazine.us/Articles/Article-Detail/ArticleId/1653/The-impact-of-athletics-on-academics
..and so on.
The district only has to pay the increased cost for one year. Next year the state will pay for it. (They limit reimbursement to the amount spent in the prior year.)
Do you prefer that middle school students walk to school in the dark?
-too late
-sleeper
You dont need to find dance teachers for 1600 students, because some kids already have late arrival.
Some students are doing Running Start, some are TA's. Photography, Pe, Pottery all are classes that dont require sitting imobile for an hr.
Marketing, Drama, Set Design, Choir, orchestra, band,
Its interesting that Seattle public high schools are 30 minutes shorter every day, than the district where my soninlaw coaches.
Maybe thats why they have better results.
According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics (2011-12), only 3.8% of public high schools start at 9:00 or later. When broken down by school size, only 1.9% of schools with more than 1000 or more students start 9:00 or later. Only 1.9%.
-NP
I'll echo what "seeking balance wrote," it is too late "for any kind of life outside of high school."
-LM
And, someone always ends up walking to or from school in the dark. Seattle has very short days in the winter. There's no avoiding it.
Beginning with next year's ninth graders, students can't have a late arrival or TA period anymore unless they're doing Running Start or have high school credit from middle school. (TA periods are only worth .25 credits per semester.)
If a later start is what prevents interaction between child and parents, then we're all in trouble. But, we all know that a pretty big red herring.
Again, like enrollment plans, no one transportation plan will make everyone happy.
-so on
HP
big difference
HP, quite true - Hale makes later start work for athletes.
-so on
yay for 2 tiers!!! let sanity prevail at SPS.
mag mom
The concern is about the end time creep over the last year. Next year, HS will be ending even later than this year's 3rd Tier schools! For all those 3rd Tier families that sucked it up thinking MS/HS would be the end of it, well, we hope you've adjusted to your new normal.
-endless insanity
I don't see what's so outrageous about a 9 am - 5 pm day. That's what typical office hours are for adults...
-so on
HP
Endless Insanity and Anonymous at 12:51pm are correct.
I hope people do as suggested above and thank the District for getting two tiers, but let them know 3:50 is too late for MS/HS. They need to get rid of the extra 20 minutes a day and weekly early release. It'd be better to have a 1/2 day off per month.
2- tiers makes school hours more workable for families than 3 tiers.
I certainly agree that homework needs to be cut back. We know the research on that one too.
-HS Parent
The biggest problem will be the competition for the fields with the Parks Department. Hale's field, Raider Field, is used by lots of groups.
HP
-not comparable
12:51anon
-POP
And you are right; comparing it to a typical adult workday doesn't make sense. Teens are much more "night owls" than adults. The biorhythms for adults swing back to an earlier sleep/wake schedule.
I'm arguing against pushing 8:45am to 9am, adding 20 minutes to the end of the day, and adding a weekly early release. Those three things add up to a 3:50PM dismissal for all MS/HS kids in SPS. That's getting home around 5pm. That's my beef, not the later start time. This year for my oldest has been so perfect. Figures SPS had to go ruin it. My youngest is still subjected to the 9:30-3:45pm schedule, but there's more flexibility with younger kids.
A very vocal group of parents pushed through the change, despite suggestions to wait another year, knowing additional changes were in the works. The impacts of earlier starts on elementary students were ignored. Sports and afterschool activities? Dismissed as secondary, even though there is a strong correlation between school involvement and student academic success. If you read some of the studies used to support later times, many of the schools had starts of 7:00-7:30 and moved to closer to 8:00. No surprise that they saw improvements, but it's what we already had!
I will admit I was never in support of the flip, but am especially bothered that it now has morphed into a 3:50 release for MS/HS. 3 bleeping 50. We are seriously considering Running Start as a means of escaping this insanity and salvaging the last few years of high school. Classes can be scheduled from 8-12.
-seeking balance
I do think that Pegi McEvoy and her group did spend a lot of time on making two tiers work, because that is what people wanted, so a big thanks to her for not giving up!
BT
Oh, SPS. You could make it so much easier on everyone.
What's making the day late is the flip - let's be honest, okay? - but agree that a monthly early release makes more sense than the 20 min extension/short Wed combo.
Just Stop!
-HS Parent
High school kids shouldn't "get screwed over" just because just stop thinks her kid got "screwed over" in ELEMENTARY school by having a tier 3 start. Petty and short-sighted talk. Plus, I can find 10 other elementary parents who'd claim their kid was screwed over by being in tier 1. The only folks in ALL of SPS not complaining are tier 2.
What's the time slot SPS got rid of in this proposal? The MOST desired - current tier 2! So, we're all screwed.
As well you can "blame" advocates for the later start but to say they didn't consider all angles isn't something you can say. You don't know that and I certainly know that one teacher had worked on this for years and did consider the angles.
What you can say is perhaps the district didn't do due diligence (in your opinion) but you are welcome to go back and review Work Session presentations to see what they missed.
We're going to end this thread here.