2 Beaufort Co. school clusters want different start times next year, early survey results show
Beaufort County School District is divided on school start times, according to the early results of a survey sent to students, parents and school employees this month that’s gotten nearly 10,000 responses so far.
The survey is the school board’s first step to revisit its 2016 decision to start elementary schools at 7:45 a.m. and all other schools at 8:45 a.m., now that it has realized it can vary start times by school cluster.
So far, the Whale Branch and Battery Creek school clusters’ parents, employees and students have all voted to reverse the district’s current start times, with a wide majority in Whale Branch and a narrow one in Battery Creek.
School board member Earl Campbell, who represents the Whale Branch cluster, said Thursday that he does not know why Whale Branch wants to switch start times. He said he suspects it’s because many parents there commute to Hilton Head Island.
In other clusters, parents have voted to keep the current start times. Employees are split evenly, and eighth-grade and high school students have voted overwhelmingly to reverse start times.
The early results presented at Wednesday’s operations committee meeting were last updated Monday morning, according to district spokesman Jim Foster, and included responses from 4,485 parents, 1,600 employees, 3,157 high school students and 725 eighth-grade students. The committee voted to extend the survey deadline to Feb. 21.
What comes next
Parents were sent a link to the survey via email and text message, Foster said, and students and employees received it in their school email. Foster said Wednesday that parents, employees and students will get a new reminder for the survey since the deadline has been extended.
People can respond to the survey until midnight on Feb. 21. The survey has 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.
The school board will get an update on start times during their Feb. 18 meeting, and could move forward to planning town halls for constituents to discuss start times.
Start time history
The survey could change the order of school start times, but it won’t change the hour-long gap between primary and secondary school starts. 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.
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. Parent responses have ranged from praise for re-engaging secondary students in school to worries over early bus pickups for elementary students and late night extracurriculars for older students that cut into family and homework time.
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.
At a January operations committee meeting, council chairwoman and district teacher Karen 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.”
The school board voted unanimously in May to revisit start times, this time with the knowledge that each cluster could choose their own schedule.
“That’s a little room that I think we didn’t know we had,” operations committee chairman David Striebinger said at the time.
But some parents aren’t thrilled about the renewed discussion. 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.
“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.”