While Daylight Savings is a month past, some students are still getting used to that drowsy feeling in the morning. The Warren Township school board has been thinking about changing school start times. While Warren Central High School has yet to be affected by the start time changes in the past, and we actually think that is for the best.
On March 19, the school board discussed approval for elementary schools to change for the upcoming school year. As of now they start at 8:05 a.m. and get out at 3:05 p.m. Elementary schools start and leave school after the high school and before middle school. Next year, the time for students will stay the same, but staff will have more prep and meeting time. With this change next year, elementary students will start 10 minutes later and dismiss five minutes earlier. In addition, staff will start at 7:25 a.m. and end at 3:15 p.m. Monday through Thursday, then 8 a.m. to 3:15 on Fridays, helping teachers avoid losing their prep time for meetings.
In addition to the elementary changes, a change to the Warren Central staff day will go into effect next year. Although the student day will not be affected, this shift sparked conversation around whether it should.
For a lot of students, getting up early is their worst nightmare. Still, being able to get out at 2 p.m. is nice, especially for a lot of student-athletes who have more warm-up time before practice or games. Students who have to go to work around 4 or 5 p.m. also have enough time to get a little rest before their shift.
Many students actually don’t want Warren Central’s start time to change, but if it had to they wouldn't like to start too much later, with the latest start time they would like being around 8 a.m. with the possibility of getting out around 2:40. While we don’t necessarily believe that time shift would change how much people care about their attendance, it could lead to more extracurricular involvement, or even students going to tutoring or coming to school as a whole.
While we know this change only affects the elementary school students, it is supposed to give teachers more actual prep time at all grade levels, that way they dont have to worry about spending hours of their unpaid time after school to grade, create lessons and make copies. Most of the time during prep times teachers will be pulled for meetings, which leaves them with no time to actually prep for their lessons or grade.
Brookview Elementary Principal Joshua Davis said that teachers' preps were often being taken for parent meetings, meetings with administrators, IEP meetings and more, which did not give them time to prepare for teaching.
“Teachers had to use their own time off the clock to prepare and grade which they were not getting paid for,” Davis said. “This new schedule also allows for more collaborative planning time with their teams and even other grade level teachers across the district.”