Beaufort Co. schools to revisit start times — and now students will get to have a say
After three years, Beaufort County School District is again asking about school start times — and this time, students will get to weigh in, along with parents and employees.
A district-wide survey on start times will go out on Friday to all parents, district employees and students in high school and eighth grade, nine months after a unanimous vote to revisit the 2016 start time decision.
Currently, the school day runs from 7:45 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. at district elementary schools, and from 8:45 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. at district middle, K-8 and high schools.
The survey, which will remain active for two weeks, includes three questions:
If the respondent prefers a 7:45 a.m. elementary school start time and an 8:45 a.m. K-8, middle and high school start time, or vice versa;
Whether the respondent is at an elementary, middle, K-8 and/or high school;
Which school cluster the respondent is in.
District spokesman Jim Foster said that the survey is due before midnight Feb. 14. Students and employees will get the survey via school email; parents will get it via email and text, he said.
Respondents will have the option to check multiple boxes — if a parent has an elementary and middle-schooler, for example, their votes will be counted for each category, Foster said.
Early results will be presented at the operations committee’s Feb. 12 meeting, committee chairman David Striebinger said Thursday.
Decreasing the gap between start times under an hour isn’t a possibility, district transportation director Eldridge Black told the operations committee in an October presentation.
The district’s 12,000 student riders can’t fit all at once on the district’s fleet of 181 buses, staffed by about 150 drivers, according to previous reporting by The Island Packet and The Beaufort Gazette.
However, Black said it is possible to have different start time schedules at each cluster of schools in the district, which wasn’t considered when the times were switched in 2016. The survey will be split by cluster when the results are presented to the operations committee.
“I don’t know how it’s going to come out,” Striebinger said of the survey on Thursday. “The point is, there’s more options than we thought. I’d be surprised if one cluster is an outlier from the rest, but it could happen.”
‘Night and day’ for parents
The current start times were adopted in 2016, the result of a school board vote that stemmed from what the district said was a successful pilot program at Hilton Head schools and research that showed teenagers’ brains are less productive in the mornings, leading to drowsy driving and lackluster performances in first period.
The changed start times have been controversial since their implementation. While many middle and high school parents praised the change for re-engaging their children in school, others complained that student-athletes and students with jobs were missing out on quality time with their families.
Elementary school parents took issue with earlier bus pickups and bedtimes pushed up to 7 or 8 p.m. to make up for early mornings.
Last November, pilot site Hilton Head Island High School decided to move their start time back 15 minutes to 8:30, citing student car accidents.
In May, the district’s Professional Advocacy Council presented a survey to the school board that showed nearly 40 percent of parents and a third of teachers in the district believe that the 2016-17 shift in school start times are having a negative impact on students and families.
Karen McKenzie, the district’s 2018-19 Teacher of the Year and the chairwoman of the advocacy council, presented the survey results and the council’s suggestions, along with test data that shows a sharp decline in end-of-course assessment scores in 2018.
“Teachers feel that is directly linked to loss of seat time in EOC classes for athletes and students that have to leave early due to start time changes,” she said at the time.
At a school board operations committee meeting Wednesday, McKenzie brought up another issue: scheduling conflicts for district employees who work at a secondary school and have children on the elementary schedule.
“One of the reasons the teachers brought this forward is because of the impacts on teachers and the ability to retain teachers,” she said. “It’s causing a little hardship on them to have their little kids getting out before they get off work.”
But for some parents, the change has been smooth sailing. Bluffton Park resident Kay Holton said Wednesday that the later start time has made a “night and day” level difference for her sixth-grader at Bluffton Middle.
“Getting him up was like pulling teeth,” she said. “Now, he’s more present, he’s happier.”
Holton, who works from home, said that the start times haven’t impacted her transportation: She drops off her sixth-grader in the mornings so he can sleep in, and her fourth-grader can walk home from Red Cedar Elementary School. She said she hadn’t heard complaints from other parents in the years since the change.
“It was difficult. It was different at first,” she said. “But this flipping every four or five years isn’t going to help. It throws things into chaos.”