EDMONDS — People living in the Edmonds School District will soon get a chance to say which of four options for school schedules they prefer — from keeping what they now have to later start times at its high schools.
The district expects to post an online survey next week. In addition to English, the survey will be posted in Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Russian and Ukrainian.
“We’re very aware that any change has the potential to significantly impact our families and our community,” said Patrick Murphy, assistant superintendent for secondary schools.
In addition to selecting their scheduling preference, the survey will ask how the proposed schedule changes would personally affect them, he said.
The survey isn’t limited to families who currently have students in the district’s schools. Anyone who lives in the school district’s boundaries can participate.
The look at later high school start times is part of a national trend aimed at having teens get more sleep to be more alert in class. A study by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that when the school day started at 8:35 a.m., close to 60 percent of high school students were getting at least eight hours of sleep.
Grades improved for 10th-, 11th-, and 12th-grade students when start times were moved from 8 a.m. or 8:15 to 8:30, according to information presented at a University of Minnesota Teens and Sleep conference in 2013.
One proposal the Edmonds School District is considering would delay the start time at high schools from 7:20 to 8 a.m. Middle schools would start 15 minutes later, at 8:15 a.m. Start times for elementary schools would remain unchanged.
Since the district transports some 13,685 students to school each day, later start times for middle and high school students also would require spending about $4.27 million to buy 38 more buses.
“Our current transportation system is a fine tuned, tightly run operation that maximizes our buses and drivers to save as much money as possible,” said Stewart Mhyre, executive director for business and operations. So any scheduling change affects the whole system, he said.
A proposal for a new transportation levy would first have to be approved by the school board and later by voters.
The extra salary cost for additional bus drivers is estimated at $1 million.
For these reasons, if the district decided to go with that plan, it probably wouldn’t go into effect until the 2021-22 school year, said school district spokeswoman Debbie Joyce Jakala.
A second option is simply to have all the district’s schools start 25 minutes later — high school classes beginning at 7:45 a.m. and middle schools at 8:15 a.m. Elementary schools would start between 8:25 a.m. and 9:45 a.m.
Another option is to move back high school start times to 8:25 a.m., have middle school days begin at 9:45 a.m., and elementary school days split between 7:45 a.m. or 9:05 a.m. starts.
That would mean student athletes, such as the swim teams, golf and tennis teams, the cross country and track and field teams, would miss more class times when participating in away games, Jakala said.
This also would affect coaches who also have classroom duties, so substitute teachers would need to be hired, an extra cost of up to $25,000 more annually.
Or the district could stick with its current schedule of high schools starting at 7:20 a.m., middle schools at 8 a.m. and elementary schools starting between 8 a.m. and 9:20 a.m.
People can participate in the online survey on school scheduling for about two weeks after it is posted.
Sharon Salyer: 425-339-3486; salyer@heraldnet.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
