I just received the Newton School Committee’s email summarizing Monday’s meeting. I clicked through to the High School Principals’ Update in which there was a section about “High school start times”.
What caught my eye was this – “we accept that there will be less classroom time under a new schedule in comparison to our current schedule”
We’ve got a 9th grader in this house so I’ve been following the High School start time issue for a while. In all the discussion over the last few years this was the first I’ve heard about starting later by shortening the school day.
I contact Steve Siegel on the School Committee to ask about it and here’s what he had to say –
“Stakeholders expressed a strong preference for later start times, and also a strong preference for finishing times that are the same or not much later than they are currently. How do you do this without adding days to the school calendar? This got the school department and principals thinking — We have identified academic pressure as being detrimental to the mental and physical well-being of our students, and we have been exploring ways to reduce this pressure.
The NPS high school day is an outlier with the greatest number of classroom hours in the state. That’s because we are Newton and we want our kids to have/learn/do everything! So now we are rethinking our schedule and believe that a shorter academic school day will offer a meaningful contribution to student wellness, by giving our students more time to breath.
The proposed reduction in classtime will bring us in line with many of our academic peer communities and we think this is a good thing independent of when high schools will start.”
What do you think? Are Newton’s kids school days too long? Is starting later and shortening the school day killing two important birds with one stone or undermining our kids education?
The NPS, in contemplating high school start times, put a huge emphasis on surveys and outreach. On the other hand, the process of designing a shortened school day has been shielded from public scrutiny.
The NPS administration interpreted the answers to the start time surveys as a marching order to even-out and shorten the day. To be clear, no one ever asked anyone about a shorter school day. Like everything else, it would be nice if the school committee took the approach of asking “will shortening the school day lead to better or worse education?,” and made the best decision for the kids (which is not the same thing as doing what the kids say they want or what the teachers say they want). Instead, a shortened day is presented as a fait accompli if we want a solution to the public health debacle created by the current high school start time.
Despite the fact that the administration has been working on the shortened day for over a year, we do not have details and won’t have details until December. The public won’t have much time to digest and weigh in on the shortening of the day and the school committee won’t have much time to put together their strategy for having a healthy high school start time in the fall of 2019.
Since the three student suicides, NPS has been looking broadly at addressing student stressors including workload reduction, homework demands, student connectedness, HSST, the SOS program, and more. The length of the school day, something that connects all of these issues, has been part of open discussion at our school committee meetings for the past year and we will continue to engage with the public as this shapes up. And we strongly encourage folks like Jerry and Jeffrey to continue to come to us with their questions and concerns.
In addition, NPS has been considering engaging on the huge project of fixing the HS schedules for many years but the start time discussion became the catalyst. Schedule and start time are independent concerns but are quite related.
Thank you, Steve
I’m fine with the shortened day in principle, but I’d want to make sure that shortened school day doesn’t result in more homework to ‘make up for’ material that teachers no longer have time to cover in class. @Steve Siegel, has this concern come up in discussions?
My 11th grader lucked out with her schedule this year and has several days a week with a free period in A block. Being able to sleep in a few days a week has been a godsend.
I have a sophomore and this topic has been discussed by the school committee since he was in elementary school. Nothing has changed. The high school start time is awful. My kids body is not meant to wake up at 5:45 AM to make a 6:50 AM bus. And the bus home, doesn’t come til 4 PM, even though the end of the day is 3:20 PM.
The cost of moving high school start time will be large for transportation, but the cost my kid (and many others) is paying is larger. His body is crying out for help and I can’t help him.
Don’t get me started about homework. He has one teacher that doesn’t give weekend homework. The rest all do. And homework “free” vacations? HA. The homework isn’t due on Monday, it is due on Tuesday. What a joke. Talk about stress.
Let’s focus on the evidence. We all agree that there is indisputable evidence that starting high school late improves education and health. Regarding the length of the school day, many studies claim that extending the school improves academic performance–particularly for at-risk kids. If we believe this (I have not read many of these studies, yet) then presumably shortening the school day would reduce academic performance. I do not know of a study that relates stress or suicide risk to the length of the school day, but I am eager to learn more.
Here is an unscientific article from the Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/extended-school-days/371896/
High school start times are just one small piece of the district’s response to adolescent mental health and suicide. My son was a junior at Newton South when those tragic deaths occurred and he is now a junior in college. Four years have passed, and not only has nothing changed, the number of suicides and attempted suicides and psychiatric hospitalizations has continued. The School Committee and Central Administration does not publicize those numbers to the community. The implementation of homework free weekends and Signs Of Suicide curriculum has not decreased the number of suicide attempts and psychiatric hospitalizations. The culture at Newton South to achieve at any cost is toxic. I have a current junior at South who sees her friends suffering with anxiety, eating disorders, substance abuse, depression….and this is from a group of high achieving, college bound students. The high schools will be on a better path to health with later start times but that is only one piece of the solution. The number of mental health counselors must be increased. We don’t need to arm our teachers with guns. We need more sensitivity training for all staff. We need as a community to take a deep look at what our values are. Are the AP and multiple Honors courses our students take, with homework that keeps them up past midnight, with multiple exams and papers due that stress them out, is getting into a high stakes college, is paying high sums of money for tutors, SAT prep classes, college coaches, what we want as our legacy? We live in a much different society than when I went to high school in the late 1970’s. Our kids can’t disconnect from 24/7 social media and so the angst and stress is being stoked all the time. We have very bright, curious, creative teens in Newton. Let’s give them the tools and support they need.
Certainly at NSHS it would be nice if they had a consistent end time rather than 3 long days and 2 short. On Wednesdays a student taking the bus gets on around 6:50am and won’t be home until after 4:15pm (and that’s with no after school sport or activity). That’s a long day for a kid facing several hours of homework.
Though I’d rather not have actual in-class time shortened, I’ll take it if it is the only way NPS can get to a later start time. Early start times leave many students spinning their wheels. They will be more productive if they are given an opportunity for proper rest. During a recent conference we asked my daughter’s advisor what types of things he did with his advisory group. He answered, “often I just let them sleep.”