Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The school board (and Starr) pitted the high school parents against the elementary school parents in a successful divide-and-conquer play.

And now the issue is off the table for a few more years.

I don't agree with this. ES gets more time for recess and lunch. Isn't that something people always complain about, that there isn't enough time for those things?

The ES students will be in MS soon enough.

It's not ,10 more minutes per recess period. If the school has 3 lunch/recess times it is 3 minutes added to each.

Anonymous wrote:By rule, all MCPS elementary schools open 30 minutes before the start time to allow (FARMs) students to eat breakfast at school. Non-breakfast eating students generally are allowed to enter the school building no later than 15 minutes before the start time. The 10 minute shift in the ES start time is not going to have nearly as much impact as a 20 minute shift would have had.

Our schools doors open 30 minutes before school and students all eat at their desks after they get to their classrooms (so not before school)

By rule, all MCPS elementary schools open 30 minutes before the start time to allow (FARMs) students to eat breakfast at school. Non-breakfast eating students generally are allowed to enter the school building no later than 15 minutes before the start time. The 10 minute shift in the ES start time is not going to have nearly as much impact as a 20 minute shift would have had.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If they could handle 9:15 they can handle 9:25

It's not really the same. When school starts at 9:15, people can have their kid dropped off by 9:05 or 9:10 and easily make it to work by 9:30. Starting at 9:25 is more challenging. Unless your job allows you to start at 10am, you're definitely paying for before care, where you might not need to with a 9:15 start time.

DC is at a tier 2 school and doors open by 9. Under this proposal, doors open at 9:10, so it would not be a 9:25 drop. Depending on your commute, 9:30 might still be difficult, but it shouldn't affect as many people as what pp is saying.

Our Tier 2 opens doors at 8:45. This seems to vary by school. Seems like it wouldn't be unreasonable to ask for a 9:00 drop since other schools open the doors earlier.

14:37, thanks for the clarification. The extra 10 minutes for ES Lunch/Recess did not make it into my consciousness until now. :>

Anonymous wrote:Was the 10 extra minutes for ES lunch/recess in any of the proposals?

Yes, they adopted "option 1a" in the list of proposals (seen on the next-to-last page here): http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/info/belltimesworkgroup/2015BellTimesOptionsFeedback.pdf

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If they could handle 9:15 they can handle 9:25

It's not really the same. When school starts at 9:15, people can have their kid dropped off by 9:05 or 9:10 and easily make it to work by 9:30. Starting at 9:25 is more challenging. Unless your job allows you to start at 10am, you're definitely paying for before care, where you might not need to with a 9:15 start time.

DC is at a tier 2 school and doors open by 9. Under this proposal, doors open at 9:10, so it would not be a 9:25 drop. Depending on your commute, 9:30 might still be difficult, but it shouldn't affect as many people as what pp is saying.

Anonymous wrote:Was the 10 extra minutes for ES lunch/recess in any of the proposals?

It is supposed to be for extra lunch and recess. It will most likely start out that way, and be changed to result in more instruction time so that 'no child is left behind'.

Was the 10 extra minutes for ES lunch/recess in any of the proposals?

To 14:09 from the PP, what I mean is that the price of having much later high school start times (not just the 20 minute later option) was having substantially later elementary school start times, which was untenable for working parents. So while the high school parents lobbied for change, the elementary school parents lobbied against it, as designed. The elementary school parent opposition was relatively late to the game. Until then the high-school parents pressing for later start times were just about the only voices in the room.

With 9:15, people pay for before care unless they WAH or SAH. It's not going to make much of a difference.

Anonymous wrote:If they could handle 9:15 they can handle 9:25

It's not really the same. When school starts at 9:15, people can have their kid dropped off by 9:05 or 9:10 and easily make it to work by 9:30. Starting at 9:25 is more challenging. Unless your job allows you to start at 10am, you're definitely paying for before care, where you might not need to with a 9:15 start time.

Anonymous wrote:The school board (and Starr) pitted the high school parents against the elementary school parents in a successful divide-and-conquer play.

And now the issue is off the table for a few more years.

I don't agree with this. ES gets more time for recess and lunch. Isn't that something people always complain about, that there isn't enough time for those things?

The ES students will be in MS soon enough.

Anonymous wrote:If they could handle 9:15 they can handle 9:25

I agree. I'm not sure that 10 min in the morning makes a difference.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Elementary school parents need to wake up and smell the coffee. I'm sure your child can suffer through an extra ten minutes of school. One of these days your kids won't be in elementary school anymore and you'll appreciate why many parents of teens feel so strongly about the change in times. No teenager should be walking to a bus or standing around in the dark waiting for a bus. I agree that 20 minutes was not optimal to help with the sleep issue, but if it gets kids off the streets in the dark then it's worth it.

I have a KGer and I totally agree with this! And 10 extra minutes to relax at lunch of recess sounds pretty awesome to me.

It sounds pretty awesome if you can afford both after-care AND before-care. It's definitely tough for parents who aren't as wealthy. It can be a pretty sizable financial burden.

We have KAH at my school and it's an extra $335/month for before care (on top of what we're already paying for after-care).

Before care at KAH is not that much more if you already pay aftercare.

Yeah, it's $80 per month to add 5-day-a-week morning care if you are already paying for 5 days of afternoon care for KAH at my school. Not to say that's insignificant, but it's not as bad as you make it sound. I'll also be interested to see how many parents need to change their need for before care based on a 10 minute shift in start times. I have a kid at a Tier 2 school, and we already needed before care because of the 9:15 start time. The new proposal doesn't change anything for us, and I think that overall it is a good balance between needs of older and younger children.