POLL: Wayland Looks To Change School Start Times; Should They?

WAYLAND, MA—"The School Committee is committed to addressing the health and wellness of our students, and an important piece of that is our initiative to evaluate changing our school start times," the school committee said in a recent announcement.

The committee has been reviewing research, listening to students, parents and staff, and considering the pros and cons of alternative scenarios as it relates to start times in Wayland. They've also been tossing around ideas about improving on those very scenarios.

The committee plans to hold public forums over the course of the fall, and updates the community on "where we are, and the path forward toward our decision."

The committee wants to relay the following key points:

● Science supports later times for teens for health and safety reasons.
● The School Committee is committed to changing start times to align with guidelines from
the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC),
starting in the fall of 2019.
● The School Committee is seeking community input to help us determine which option is
best. We will be holding forums in the fall and expect to make a final decision in midNovember.

"We have undertaken this initiative because of overwhelming research in the field of sleep science that points to the risks of too early start times for our middle and high school students," said the announcement, and the resulting benefits of moving their school start times later. These risks span physical and emotional impacts, including detrimental impacts on depression and anxiety, drowsy driving, athletic injury rates and athletic performance, accident rates of all types, obesity and diabetes, and impacts on learning through, for example, memory and attention span.

"Parents can help by working with teens to establish healthy sleep habits, but the research has shown that good sleep hygiene alone is not enough to allow teens to get the sleep they need. The sleep-wake cycle of teenagers differs from that of both younger children and adults, and pushes them to have more difficulty getting to sleep earlier and waking earlier. Our students require both more sleep, and sleep at more appropriate hours."

The school committee is in support of moving the start times later, but says it understands there are complications in adjusting those schedules for all the system's students, including those in high school, middle school, elementary school, in Wayland and in Boston. It also, of course, affects the parents and teachers, the committee acknowledges.

"We are working hard to select a start time scenario that appropriately balances the needs of all these constituents," said the announcement. "One obvious complication is that because we use the same buses to transport our high school and middle school students as we do for our elementary students, any adjustment in start time for the older students requires changes to the schedule for the younger ones, as well. Other
complications include scheduling for sports and other extracurricular activities, and adjustments
to schedules for teachers and parents.

"Having looked last fall in detail at a schedule that moves start times later for all students, we determined that we would prefer to find a solution that moves our older students’ start time later, and our younger students’ start time earlier. We did not, however, reject this solution completely, unanimously agreeing that it was preferable to our current start times. In other words, we are committed to making a change in our start times; what remains is to determine precisely what that change will be."

The scenarios the committee is looking at, roughly, would start elementary school between 7:45 and
8:00 a.m., and high school at 8:30 to 8:45 a.m. (with corresponding adjustments to the day’s end
times).
Among variations under exploration:
● when to hold professional development at the Middle School and High School (with possible implications for whether we continue to have early release days, or instead spread those minutes over all five days)
● whether to retain the morning break in the high school schedule
● analysis of bus routes looking for efficiencies that might enable shorter transportation times
● cost-benefit analysis of additional buses to shorten bus routes
● changes within the high school schedule to minimize impact on sports schedules

This fall, the committee holds several meetings to hear from students, parents and teachers on
their thoughts on the various alternatives, before making a final decision in mid-November.

The tentative schedule is as follows:
● Oct. 10 - morning meeting with parents (in Wayland)
● Oct. 15 - meeting with Wayland teaching staff
● Oct. 17 - evening meeting with parents (in Wayland)
● Nov. 5 - evening meeting with parents (in Boston)
● Nov. 19 - target date for final decision

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