001good evening this is superintendent mike morris and thank you for being here for this family town hall talking about start times and looking ahead to next year we have a number of people on the stream uh who may jump in with comments or questions so i'll add them to the stream now uh and we can introduce ourselves and then we'll we'll start going but mickey why don't you start us off hello everyone i'm miki gramacki assistant principal at amherst high school and tim hi everyone i'm tim sheehan and i'm the curriculum coordinator for the district and sam hi i'm sam camera interim assistant principal at the high school as well derek good evening everyone my name is derek shea i'm the principal at crocker farm elementary school great and marta hi everyone i'm marta guevara
002director of student and family engagement for all schools great thank you and um tonight we're going to share a pretty brief presentation i would say it's 15 minutes or less hopefully on the left side and really it's an opportunity to ask questions offer feedback to offer comments as we think about start times for the fall 2021 hard to say school year one thing to note is you could see sasha figueroa put a comment in there if you do want to make comments or questions on the bottom right of your screen you should see a line that says i think faintly it says say something and you can type something and press press enter and that pops up for us and so we probably will go through this and get to the comments and questions at
003the end but anytime anything comes up for you please do jump in with that at this point i'm going to have our panelists head to the green room so that people i can bring up the actual presentation but they'll be back later for any comments or questions you have okay and now i'm going to bring up the presentation there it is you need to see me there we go um so we're talking about start times tonight and i think one thing to note is that this is not a new conversation to our community i was studied many many times over in the last 20 years most in depth in the 2011-2012 school year and really all that's changed in the last eight nine years is that we have more evidence about the impact of start
004times on students particularly adolescent students so we're really building off the work of many people in the community who volunteered a lot of time and energy put together i think was a 57-page report about eight years ago and uh so you know just want to share my appreciation for the staff and families who worked on that so i'll put in the uh chat actually maybe sasha can uh the link to these slides um and sasha if you if you need to find it just let me know and i can pull it up um because these these are they may be now on our website but if they're not i can share the link to them but you know they want to start with what's the research say and the summary is that there are a
005few things in educational research that are as clear as the benefits of later start time for secondary school students in terms of first outcomes a point as you see it says students more likely to get adequate sleep um it's uh you know a lot of the concerns are that if you have students give them more time in the morning that they will just stay up later and what the research evidence says is they use about two thirds or three quarters of that extra time to get more rest so in other words in our scenario we'll be looking at about an hour 15 minutes the average student would sleep for about 50 55 minutes more than what they did now and they'd stay up about 20 minutes later uh 30 minutes later so you know they
006really do get more sleep uh the outcomes in terms of suspensions academic performance course grades tardiness absences especially for underserved students are all to the positive there's a significantly reduced likelihood of car crashes for students driving to school i should also note that includes also driving students driving later in the afternoon or evening who have been up for a very long time and you can see there's this chart from cdc which talks about some of the implications uh around well-being physical activity mental health risky behaviors all those things that are tied to getting enough sleep so there's a lot of evidence suggesting that this is a very good strategy for secondary school students this is a slide put together by a colleague from the cape who's also looking at this issue and what you can
007see is the typical circadian wake-up times of students at different ages and then the ideal start time so well our juniors and seniors would love an 11 o'clock start time perhaps that's not something that's feasible for us but what this chart really shows is that when students are waking up between six and seven to get to secondary school they're not just losing the tail end of their sleep they're losing the rem sleep they're losing the sleep that's critically important for functioning during the school day and beyond so it's highly concerning that we five days a week have the practice of interrupting that sleep and telling students to go to bed earlier for anyone who has a teenager is not always the most effective parental strategy and causes a lot of stress and strife with families
008so we know that we are interrupting adolescent sleep five days a week based on our school schedule here is our current situation so prior to this school year buses dropped off about 7 30 middle school high school and clad the first bell rang at 7 45. to make that happen our first pickup of our earliest bus is 6 37 in the morning and we have seven buses at the region whose first pickup is before seven in the morning our elementary buses ballpark about 8 30. uh first pickup we do have a couple buses that do pick up before eight in the morning and i am being inclusive of shoots man leverage in this conversation well i'm not the superintendent of those elementary districts i want to be clear that we looked at our we have
009a shared bus system so i'm looking at all the buses uh within the four towns this school year we've had this nine o'clock start time for the secondary schools because of the coveted schedule and what we've found is that it has been really positively received by students and by families i can't have a conversation without a middle with a middle school and high school student where this topic doesn't come up and it's often framed as are we really going back to 7 45 next year with some significant concerns for students not really what drove us that's what part of the reason that drove us to look at this right now is we have this um forced um experiment if you will about the impact on students with a later start time and in general we're
010hearing really positive feedback about this aspect of this year just a little tardiness data so for the days that we were in session 113 days last year at the high school seven percent of students were late on an average day i think the numbers also looked worse at the time we stopped so in the month of september that number is really low as we head towards the winter the number of tardies went up and looking at previous years they don't really go down in the spring so they sort of crescendo up and then you know the very end of the year go down a little bit but pretty consistent that we have a large percentage of our students of the students at our high school who are absent on a regular basis anecdotally we have
011a lot of stories from students and staff who discuss lower engagement in a period classes and lower engagement might mean sleepy students but it might be in less dynamic interactions and conversations and that's you know we are a discourse based school district we believe that it's not just sage on a stage teaching so we rely on students to be at their best to have that deep level of interaction for our educational programming so we essentially have two options for next year we could go back to our prior schedule which you know move back to 745 for secondary and maintain our elementary schedule or we could flip the schedules of the elementary students attending first we are working on bus routes and so it looks like school buses would arrive about at 8 10 so it's
012about 20-25 minutes earlier than typical or earlier than they have at the elementary to make this work and about nine or 905 at the regional level we did look at could we just push everybody back half an hour and with our partner districts in shoe spare leverage it just wasn't possible for them so that is why that is not uh under consideration at the time at this time so key phrase why now and you can see if you look at these slides uh a really good link to an article from zhao mehta and the new york times from a month or two ago and you know if if nothing else we've learned to be really flexible and that we can adjust schedules and we can make things work this year and we don't want to
013just make it work for this year we want to learn what's working better we don't want to just go back to the way things were we want to be better than we were because we have this forced experiment this year we've learned a lot and we want to pursue it now as opposed to flip-flopping going back perhaps and then studying it for another year we think there's an opportunity to perhaps use what we've learned and improve the outcomes of our for our students by making this change you can see some data from our partner district in northampton they voted last month to make this change they had a very similar schedule to us they have three runs elementary jfk where it says that that's the middle school in northampton and nhs is their high school
014so they looked at two different changes proposal a and proposal b started with elementary and ended with secondary you can see there this is their stakeholder feedback survey and um the maintaining the current schedule was uh by in the far minority and this was true across stakeholder groups it was true among families it was true among staff and it was true among students so they voted to make this change it's also worth noting about eight or nine uh districts out in the eastern part of state um also got together and made a change two years ago so we're not really trend setters we we maybe just be joining the party so to speak on this nationally there's been a big movement to this for the last 10 years and there's a lot of solid evidence
015as to why but here's where the rubber meets the road when we think about implications and logistics and schedules so at our elementary our start times being earlier means earlier bus runs it means working with our after school programs that's where dr gavarro who's on this call has been helpful setting up meetings and trying to talk about the additional hours and potentially additional demand for aftercare programs in the future that early dismissal is you know we're talking 240 245 so that is uh that will have an impact on families um you know for some families the morning's really tough and this would be great for their families this will create additional challenges for about 25 minute difference from our current schedules at the region we are looking to revise our schedules to reduce transition times
016in other words how do we keep the same number of instructional hours but reduce the number of hours students are in school so they get out a little bit earlier than they might and right now that looks in the neighborhood of a 330 dismissal one of the things to note is that we are working actively with our transportation department to look at our routes we're one of very few districts who go as close to door-to-door as we do particularly at the regional level and there's four reasons we're looking at changing that one is if we can have fewer stops our bus runs get shorter and then we can shrink the difference in times between elementary and secondary routes give us more flexibility secondly there's a huge environmental cost to making extra runs there are some
017stops that we've identified that are literally 100 yards away from one another with no safety concerns so we are looking to consolidate stops next year the third thing is that we know that there are when we look at our apartment complexes and then we look at our other lower density housing we have a disparity in what we're asking students to walk how far to walk from an equity perspective it's not something we can do and finally we don't want students on buses for very long rides i think if we can reduce the amount of time students run buses that's good for everybody in the organization so we are actively looking at that as part of this process in terms of athletics our high school team is working on different schedule models this year athletics do
018not start in historically athletics don't start until three o'clock or later we think we'll be able to come close to matching that if not exactly match that with the schedule for next year and still be able to maintain our full plethora of athletic teams and competitions uh you know northampton making the change if we are able to make this change we imagine other districts in our area have already been in touch with me about the change and our high school ended a little a little bit earlier than some of the other high schools in the area unrelated to late start so we think we'll be successful in creating a schedule with enough flexibility at the end of the day where we'll be able to make that work so this is part of our engagement process
019um you know for those who don't know some of the um that involves town halls like this surveys and focus groups some of the focus groups are like cpac our special ed parent advisory council bpac our bilingual parent advisory council our parent guardian organizations family center group we are meeting with leverage and shoots ferry folks as well i appreciate their partnership with this met with their superintendent and their team a couple times already and we're looking to end our engagement on february 26th with the school committee vote on march 2nd and the reason they have to vote by mark by early march is that we need to have this so that our transportation department can plan and also our staff and families can plan on a potentially different schedule if we don't end up changing
020it then we can plan on that there is no schedule that's going to be the same as this year that's for sure so we we do need some direction on the sooner side so i know it does feel expedited here are some dates that we already have in terms of some of the engagements that are planned one of the things you'll note is that there's a survey that will be going out wednesday to all of our stakeholder groups our secondary students our all of our families all of our staff and we're trying to get some quantitative as well as qualitative feedback from that survey tool we'll be sharing that publicly as well and our last slide and this is good about 15 minutes so i'm right on time is just a listing of professional groups
021endorsing the 8 30 or late starter starting time for secondary school so you can see the american medical association center for disease control american academy of pediatricians society behavioral medicine and american psychological association when those five groups all make position statement statements which they don't they don't do too quickly all advocating for the same thing i think it's incumbent on us to at least take this seriously and see if it's something our community can endorse uh and if not then then you know we'll respond to that it has to have support in the community but i think we at least have to take this um this effort very seriously as i close up the slides and people can start putting questions and comments in there i think one other thing that i didn't say and
022i don't think i said it this morning at the earlier town hall [Music] is that we also there our elementary principals are going to engage upper elementary students and not so much a survey but a dialogue to give them context and get feedback from them so we are looking at getting feedback from elementary students based on where they are developmentally and the fact that they haven't experienced the earlier start it's a little different than filling out a survey but we feel like that's going to be an effective way to gather feedback from elementary students so that i went pretty quick because again i'm trying to make this much more about responding to comments and feedback than than about presentation but the presentation link sasha thank you put already put there so all the hyperlinks within
023that are available to anyone um it's a public document at this point and at this point i will stop presenting and just open it up for any questions comments or feedback from anyone who's on the line really the point is to share this but really to hear from all of you about you know your thoughts on that and while i give you time to type in comments i'll just put my email address and actually i'll ask sasha to put my email address and the school committee email address on there because if you think of things later this isn't the only opportunity for feedback but another way is to email email me or email a school committee or email both for that information but at this point i'll just pause and see if folks have questions
024or comments that they'd like to share and thanks yeah i was better late than never i think there are some families who feel that way who really advocated in 2011 and 2012 and even among our administrative team we have some of us have kids in the district and they feel that feel that way as well so thank you for that um yeah thank you for that feedback sarah lee asks is there any discussion of length in the day for elementary students as part of this conversation not that i've not that has come up to me um but that's certainly something we could look at i think likely you know there are some contractual uh concerns that probably would be expressed about length in the school day and that's really working with our after-school partners about
025how we could provide an extended day for for working families is the way we're going but that's a good thought we haven't thought of we hadn't talked about and we got some good thoughts this morning as well from folks um that we hadn't considered and one of the things reasons we do forums like this is not just to receive uh yay or nay feedback but to come up with ideas so lee thank you for sharing that um here's another one thank you for sharing that feedback [Music] and i'm looking at the panelists i'm trying to think if there's anything i missed when i was going through my spiel because i know i did go a little quickly through it so i'm trying to look down i'm going to bring them back on if that's okay
026people can remember that they're here and can ask questions of them is there anything i missed um while we're waiting for comments or questions that anyone wants to jump in or any thoughts about they've been through a number of these with me so um they're they're they may be a little tired of me hearing me say this but um sam and mickey since there's not give people more time to comment do you want to talk a little bit about some of the creative thoughts about the high school schedule and and things we're exploring because i think that'd be relevant to the conversation yeah i'm happy to begin um so this year um in an effort to reduce transitions and and prepare for you know what could be you know a lot of unknowns we changed
027the high school schedule to a three by three with an additional block for students who needed it and so we've gotten a lot of feedback um from families and students that they really like this block schedule and so what we did in preparation for this flipped start conversation was to prepare a seven drop one which was the high school schedule that we had prior to this year as well as a four by four block which is most closely related to the three by three that we're doing now and the feedback that we're receiving is that obviously um high school students really like the later start because they're starting at nine o'clock right now for those of you who don't have students in the high school or middle school and that they really like focusing on
028fewer classes at a time we've gotten a lot of feedback about that four block for next year and what that would allow us to do in light of this flip start because those of you who were around in 2011 we knew that athletics certainly played a role in not moving this forward but with a four by four block we can actually get all four uh blocks in by three o'clock however we don't meet the 990 hours of instruction if we dismiss it three o'clock instead we would need to extend the school day to 3 30 and like almost all schools that have a four by four block anticipate building in a flex period and that period would allow students to do all kinds of experiential learning they could do their alps they could do internships
029for students who typically take a directed study they could fill that time with the directed study so we would have a group of stakeholders looking at what that is but most importantly if students had early dismissals um for athletic competitions and so forth they wouldn't actually be missing their four core classes and so we find that that's a real benefit of if we do change the start time and going to a 4x4 that that certainly would be a benefit great thanks mickey see some questions have come in um so here's one are we looking to completely new bus routes there are big discrepancy between routes regarding number of students in length so i think the short answer is yes we are looking at different bus routes you know for instance we noticed there might be
030some efficiencies realized if buses at the regional level went through both shoots bear and levitt in the past we've kind of used the elementary routes in those two communities and we've our folks have sort of created some different routes and realized some efficiencies there there's always going to be a bit of a disparity students who are living in higher density housing are going to have shorter bus routes in general because they can fill a bus a lot quicker when you're talking about students living in less dense uh housing the routes are going to be longer because it takes longer for the bus to go uh there so our shortest routes tend to not just be the ones closest to the school they tend to be the one with that had the fewest number of pickups
031that are the most they're closely connected but the short answer is yes we are looking into all those routes um oh thank you juni i'm just gonna pull up all the comments and renata if there could be some after-school clubs like chess yeah i think that'd be great and you know back renata you remember we're at crocker farm with mr shea and we put together some wednesday afternoon clubs back in the day and i think i think you're right and i think there'll be a lot of popular interest in that so thank you for that idea that's spot on question about um what would the decision-making process be with leverage and shoots berry so sam has been in some of those meetings with the principal of both principals of both schools as well as a
032superintendent transportation coordinator and we are actively working with them we have a shared bus system which is again brings a lot of efficiency financially for us and particularly for them being two small districts and they're really i feel like they've shaped a lot of the conversation in healthy ways we want to start from the beginning that we want to collaborate and we i learned a lot about shoots man love and i've been to those schools and we've done a lot that i didn't know and and i don't know if sam if you have anything to add but i really feel like it's been a collaborative effort and it'll be collaborative decision making i know it was a topic conversation at their shootsbury school committee the other night so our shootsbury rep went from our meeting
033regional meeting to shootsbury meeting back to our meeting to report out what they talked about in shoots bear on this very topic so um it's active conversation sam anything i'm yeah just they've been very clear very frank um i think they're one of the reasons we decided we can't do the sort of full push back both both schedules and so it's been really uh helpful i agree with you and just uh some thank you sarah for the lived experience which is always really helpful um and um yeah and we have a lot of community organizations we'd want to partner with on this um so i agree with you here's a question about the three by three block for the high school forgotten learning and math and language classes um mickey sam you want to jump
034in because i think that's something that we have heard and we'll continue to hear and talk about our options and how to mitigate some of that or ways we might yeah i mean i think those are the choices that we're going to have to make as a community there's other block schedules that also would leave at three o'clock but it would be more of what they call the a b format which is where students would have all eight of their courses and then they would alternate every other day which will offer that continuity across the year um so a lot of schools that that find that that's what they really you know they really want that continuity all year they tend to go with the a b for communities that are looking for more focus
035on fewer courses they tend to choose the semester so i think when we engage the community in conversations about if we again if we go to the block which block i think it's going to be really important for you to share your feedback thanks mickey um and so another question uh with the potential move of sixth grade to the middle school have an impact on this could buses accommodate in the same time um quick answer is yes uh we've looked into that we don't have routes done because we don't exactly know who our students will be we don't know who our kindergartners will be but one grade level wouldn't tip the balance too much and the reality is our secondary buses tend to be less filled than our elementary buses uh for a whole host
036of reasons and so we don't see that as material affecting things at the current time um either way but it's a great question um thank you all right um well we're given a chance for people to maybe think of more questions um derek do you mind just talking a little bit about from the elementary perspective um some thoughts you had sorry to put you on the spot there um i i i think i would just respond to a couple of things that were said earlier so ronaldo had mentioned the possibility of clubs and i don't see why not you know i mean obviously uh covert permitting um we get back in the building and with um a number of uh college students and university students have come to help us in the past with clubs
037i think last year we had perhaps in any given day close to 100 students who stayed in the after school program which is probably about you know about a third of our of our population so i could certainly see how there could be space for for that i i do think you know from an elementary perspective any changes is difficult um but someone who's a principal in elementary school but also has worked in a high school and has children who've just most recently been through the high school i can testify that you know leaving in the morning to go on a bus at 7 10 a.m to be in a class at 7 45 as challenges i think for 16 year olds it's not an easy thing to do and i've actually noticed myself my
038own child who's a senior in high school doesn't have to go up until 8 30 now what a difference from having up at like you know 6 45 that's me yep and um so i'm gonna take one more question i'd love for marta if you want to jump in just about that aftercare um actually why don't marta why don't you jump in and then i'll get to the question because this is on a similar theme in terms of the after care programs sure so we are uh we're very lucky that we work very closely with our after-school uh program staff they're great they obviously are part of our community and they value you know our education and our decision making process and they're part of that so we're excited they're willing to work with us
039um we have we've had one preliminary meeting just to you know to share uh the plan and we're meeting again this week just to check in to talk about you know ramifications and what you know the questions are there's some thoughts about providing additional slots uh perhaps by hour so the different people are having a lot of great ideas as to how to take care of you know if the need increases um and we'll be ready to do it we have a great collaborative team and they're just phenomenal thank you dr gover um here's one just about take away from bringing students back um anecdotally i don't have data to show this but um what i've heard from other superintendents as i've spoken to them and you know we're part of our national network of
040schools as well as in massachusetts is that frankly it's had the opposite effect that a lot of families are attracted to um school and a school system that's taking this in mind and many private schools not all but many private schools do start the day a little bit later than most public high schools and so it yeah i don't i don't have data again i haven't i can tell you what the research says that i've read and this is not what i've read research but anecdotally um i've heard some positive feedback about retaining students and actually expanding an interest to additional students um the move six weeks to middle school on the table for next year just wonder if this would all be happening once that is a school committee decision but i feel pretty
041confident suggesting that the move of sixth grade to the middle school is not on the table for next year um you know i've heard no no conversation about it and i think frankly it's not possible to to achieve um it's january 25th right now uh i don't see that something that could be done uh between now and start of the next school year so i think it is a conversation the community likely will have but not for the fall um right so where's good question where's the research on having an earlier start time for elementary students or research on what a longer day with extended care for elementary students would mean um so you know the evidence that i've seen is is pretty low impact on elementary students um particularly for starting after eight o'clock
042because of uh when they typically wake up in the morning and i want to note that there are some elementary students school students who are gonna have a hard time because they're used to sleeping late and there's some secondary students who love to wake up early and are gonna have time really in the aggregate um so the research that i've seen on elementary students is is uh relatively low impact um either way um but that's a great question and i should have addressed it earlier so thank you for the for that um people another um [Music] miniature i'm trying to think of other topics we didn't hit this evening that we hit this morning oh oh getting them back now yeah no thank you for that um you know we'll see how the parent feedback
043is uh and family feedback on the survey and i think that'll give us some indication um yeah oh thank you that's very kind and you know it's really about the team you know and i feel like i'm building off there was a secondary teacher who when we did the staff town hall last week was talking about all the work they'd done nine years ago on this topic and really came from you know the educators recognizing what was happening in their schools particularly in a period classes that that's why we're here um [Music] i'm trying to think of other things that we didn't hit on i think we talked about athletics we talked about some schedules some buses some aftercare um i think we hit on a lot of the big topics today so you know
044again comments we'll still give it a minute or two if people have more comments or questions but you know anything that comes up for you or anything that you think about later you wish you'd ask this is not the end of the road in addition to the survey you know sasha put um it's a lot of definitely a lot to juggle for everybody involved families included but please shoot me an email shoot the school committee an email shoot anyone on this call and email if you're working with them and know them well it's not the end of the engagement but you know we wanted to share this and get this feedback and we'll be back in touch throughout the process we'll be sharing all of the data that we get from the survey publicly and
045sharing that out in a friday newsletter after we've compiled it and we'll keep at it and thank you all for being here and spending some of your monday night with us we deeply appreciate your interest and your ideas and have a good evening thanks so much thank you everyone