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08/20/2019 02:45 PMWith a full school year logged under Guilford school system’s later bus and class start times, Superintendent of Schools Dr. Paul Freeman said the district is continuing full steam ahead with the changes.
Leading up to the 2018 school year, members of both the Board of Education (BOE) and the general schools community made their voices heard on the question of pushing back start times for students, a question that was settled in July of 2018, when the board voted 5-4 in favor of later openings for all schools.
The new schedule, which moved high schoolers back 15 minutes, middle schoolers 10, and elementary schoolers by five, was designed to address growing evidence that shows letting students sleep in can lead to better health and outcomes in youth, particularly teenagers.
Freeman was an early supporter of the plan, and he said by and large the change has been a positive one, and the district has no intention of going back.
“Students and teachers who I spoke to at the high school talked about there being a more relaxed, a more comfortable, a less rushed feeling,” he said.
Though many community members supported a later opening of some kind for high schoolers, the logistics of bus scheduling were seen as a significant obstacle to the plan. Many were in favor of opening five minutes later for high schoolers, and leaving middle school and elementary school start times the same.
Freeman said that after working carefully with the bus company, Guilford had actually hoped to see an increase in the efficiency of their buses, saving up to 10 minutes of bus time for high school students on their morning ride.
“That didn’t bear fruit,” said Freeman.
The balance Freeman and the BOE had to strike was ensuring buses still effectively served younger students at the end of the day. Pushing the elementary schools’ start times back further might have allowed time savings, but would have caused other problems for parents in the morning.
Freeman said that while the district didn’t increase its efficiency, there were no “unmanageable” issues with the buses last year.
In terms of the main goal, Freeman said the extra rest for high school students is something he sees as an unqualified positive for the district.
“Social-emotional wellness is obviously a much bigger conversation,” he said, “but I do think that people continue to recognize good sleep habits [as] contributing positively to that overall picture.”
Freeman said that halfway through last year, the schools put out a survey to assess the changes and got “generally positive” responses.
“Oftentimes when you make changes in public education, that’s the best you’re going to get,” he said. “We did not have pushback...to return the schedules to the previous state.”
Being able to measure the success or failure of something like a schedule change is going to be difficult no matter what, Freeman said, for several reasons. The district’s main goal—an increase in the overall mental and physical health of the high school student body—is something that can be very difficult to quantify. Isolating or correlating an incremental change in academic achievement is also uniquely difficult in this district.
“We’re going to be hard-pressed in Guilford to try to argue that we see academic performance increases as a result [of the schedule change],” Freeman said.
“We made what some people see as a relatively small change. It’s what some people see as a significant change. I think you have to let that be in place for some time before you begin noodling around with it. I think it’s positive,” Freeman said.
Bus and parking lot efficiency will be a point of focus this year, said Freeman.