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Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)
Petition: Later MCPS school start times
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Anonymous
^^^https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/siteassets/district/info/belltimesworkgroup/Rpt2013BellTimesWorkGrpReport.pdf |
Anonymous
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ICYMI: countless private school kids get up at the crack of dawn and endure a lengthy commute from the burbs to DC or across counties for their early morning start. And those kids will excel in college and the workplace.
As a product of private schools, I can report that you aren’t allowed to sleep through class. Perhaps mcps simply needs to raise the bar and crack the whip? |
Anonymous
That would be too much for the little snowflakes and their helicopter moms who frantically draft petitions and fire off lengthy emails to push back the school day so their teenagers can 30 minutes more of sleep. |
Anonymous
Or perhaps this is also non-ideal. |
Anonymous
+1 to the line in bold Getting up at the crack of dawn is so 20th century that we private school students lived through in the 80s. |
Anonymous
So you never use the snooze button on your alarm clock? 🧐 The change they made was from 7:20a to 7:40a warning bell and it was amazing how much those 20 minutes helped. Another 15-30 minutes would be helpful, especially in winter, for the HS kids to get moving with some light out. Go watch how many are walkers arriving 10, 15, 20 minutes late each day. Anyone who is really passionate about this needs to work on alternative ideas to using both school and public busses more effectively. Use the more dense areas of the county as pilots to try out some different ideas. These ideas are specifically for overlapping HS/MS bus routes with the idea of HS starting closer to MS start times. - adjust some existing public bus routes to align closer to some of the school bus routes, at least during morning and afternoon times and eliminate those school bus routes. - add additional “express” public busses at peak times to schools - add additional public bus routes that run as a circulator between HS and MS in the DCC and NEC. - use the magnet bus “hub” model for more school bus routes in the dense areas (ES, library, rec center, big apartment complexes), rather than as many routes through the neighborhoods with lots of stops. - combine MS and HS students on the same bus run and then drop at one school, then the other, where it makes geographic sense. The current model tries to get kids as quickly as possible to school by optimizing routes for each level. If you want to keep this model but change HS to be later start, then you either need more $$ for more busses, or you need to sacrifice some efficiency on some runs to be able to combine things. |
Anonymous
| HS bus stops for neighborhood HSs (not magnet) are fewer than MS school stops. And students in neighborhoods across town are packed into the same bus whether it is shortage of drivers or another reason. Currently the HS and MS start times are on average 30min apart. Why can't you simply swap HS with MS, problem solved. And leave the lil ones alone, tho if you do a survey of ES parents, they may tell you they'd take the earlier start time to make it into the office by 8 or 8:30a. |
Anonymous
My kid goes to private school in DC and leaves the house after the MCPS bus would pick up. Their private school also has a late start once a week for teacher PD, as do many area schools. |
Anonymous
HS Teacher here. There is a huge amount of well documented research on how very early start times lead to increased depression and worse academic outcomes for teenagers. Many states have pushed back high school start times for precisely this reason |
Anonymous
No, I don't use the snooze button because when I sleep for 15 more minutes, I either oversleep longer than I intended or I do sleep for the 15 minutes but still feel just as tired after dozing off since that's not long enough for me to fall back into a REM cycle to actually feel rested. |
Anonymous
The key being very early start times. HS starts at 7:45 am. We're talking about either starting at 8 am or 8:30 am, which is a difference of 15 or 45 minutes. The 8:30 start time is more meaningful, but at what cost? The county studied this a few years ago and found the upsides did not outweigh the downsides. So what has changed since that study? |
Anonymous
| MCPS should research how other states have pulled this off. The entire state of CA switched hs start times to no earlier than 8.30 am and the sky did not fall. |
Anonymous
Please read. https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/siteassets/district/info/belltimesworkgroup/Rpt2013BellTimesWorkGrpReport.pdf |
Anonymous
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Enough! They have wasted so much time and energy on this already. They have explained that they need the busses to run multiple routes, so they can't push HS later without it impacting MS and ES. They have explained that for MANY MoCo families, they need HS kids home after school to watch younger siblings (so they cannot switch HS and ES start times). They also can't have young ES students walking to school/waiting for the bus in the dark during winter. They also have an issue for student athletes, who need time after school for their activities .
So please just stop. Unless or until you donate enough money for more busses, and an endowment to buy more busses every time the additional ones need to be replaced. |
Anonymous
You do know that not all afterschool activities are sports related, right? My kid doesn't play a sport and he's still busy after school with other things (music, theater, etc.). There are also many kids in MCPS who have to work or who need to be home when younger siblings get home because the parents can't afford childcare. |