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The School Board voted last night to approve proposed changes to school start times. In the fall, elementary schools will begin class at 9:30 a.m. and K-8, junior high, and high schools will begin at 8:15 a.m. We've heard from usually reliable sources both that kids learn better in the mornings and that mornings are bad for learning, so since that one's apparently still up in the air, we'll whine about what an ill thought-through decision this is with regards to working parents.
The move to coordinate start times is, we read, about money anyway: save the district money by streamlining the bussing system. And start times, even when they've been scientifically perfected and analyzed to follow the data about kids' young moldable minds, have practical consequences for parents, who also are concerned about money: making enough of it to keep their families afloat. Even if kids do learn better after 9:30 a.m., their parents have to be at work at 8 a.m. or 8:30 a.m. Does the Seattle school district plan on stepping up their before-school care offerings? Won't that cost them more money in the long run?
Working parents, have you started to plan for how your family will adjust to the start time changes?
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I believe we wrote an article about this exact issue for our high school newspaper. The verdict: high schoolers are in such a crazy physical space that their bodies physically want to sleep and wake later than older or younger people. We hadn't heard of this shift before, but we're excited for the possibilities...
My parents haven't been involved with me getting to school since the first day of first grade. In high school, my parents weren't even awake by the time my first class started. I'm sure a lot of people with appreciate this.