Nora Grace-Flood photo
Dunbar Hill students line up to catch the bus on the first day of school.
Hamden’s Board of Education is revisiting a plan to change school start times — with hopes that families will weigh in on one of the district’s most “daunting” decisions yet.
The BOE has put on hold a previously approved plan to change the start times and bus routes in response to complaints from parents.
So instead of proceeding with the new times, the BOE has developed and distributed a survey sent out to all families and staff via email to assess their reactions to several potential transportation plans.
Board President Melissa Kaplan said that survey will remain open for 20 days and culminate with a live, community input session on Tuesday, July 26, preceding an early August vote in order to leave enough time for their contracted bus company, First Student, to get bus routes set for September.
The discussion in Hamden has differed markedly from discussions taking place nationwide over school start times. Other communities — and the entire state of Connecticut — have responded to years of research by having high schools start later because of teens’ sleep rhythms.
Hamden, on the other hand, is responding to financial pressures.
Following the Legislative Council’s decision to flat-fund the Board of Education next year alongside persistent, nationwide problems with bus driver shortages, Hamden voted earlier this summer to change school start times in an effort to cut busing costs.
Specifically, the board embraced a plan that would implement later elementary school start times, with the district’s youngest students starting classes up to 45 minutes later at 9 a.m. (Read more about the school system’s financial constraints and their most recently proposed busing plan here.)
The original idea was to first move to establish uniform start and end times for all elementary schools, half of which currently begin class at 8:15 and end at 3:04, the other half of which start at 8:45 and release students around 3:34. The administration suggested opening doors to elementary students at 9 a.m. and releasing them at 3:49 p.m., while simultaneously pushing the middle school’s start and end times from 8:15 to 8:25 and 2:29 to 2:39.
The high school would still start and end at the same times: 7:30 a.m and 2 p.m.
School district Chief Operating Officer Tom Ariola argued that by widening the gap between when schools open would allow more time for buses that typically make multiple runs between the high school, middle school, and elementary schools to make it to school yards on time — and the district’s contracted bus company, First Student, could better avoid calling in additional buses when on-the-clock drivers are otherwise delayed. In turn, he argued the district could cut around $518,000 in transportation costs by dropping the number of buses called in each day by six.
However, parents and teachers alike came out en masse to oppose the idea, citing anticipated difficulties in getting to their 9‑to‑5 jobs on time, an inability to pay more in daily, early-morning childcare costs, and the challenge of keeping young children engaged in school later into the afternoon.
Hence the pause button and current survey.
“We have five or six different plans we’re interested in receiving public input on,” said Kaplan, who led the decision to table a final vote on this coming school year’s start and end times. “There’s also an opportunity for the community to share: Do they have ideas, do they have solutions that we haven’t come up with? We can’t assume there aren’t other creative options we haven’t realized.”
Here are the options that the BOE offered (read through them and vote yourself here):
Change all elementary schools, which are currently split between 8:15 a.m. and 8:45 a.m. openings and 3:04 p.m. and 3:34 p.m. closures, to a uniform 9 a.m. start time and 3:49 p.m. dismissal, following the same plan that the board originally pitched.
Still switch from a four-tier system to three-tier with uniform elementary start times, but start and dismiss each school 30 minutes earlier.
Change the order of pick up so that elementary school students start school first, Hamden high schoolers second, and Hamden middle schoolers last.
Pick up Hamden high schoolers first, elementary students second, and Hamden middle schoolers last.
Somehow find more funding to maintain the old busing system without lowering the number of buses.
Don’t change anything, resulting in fewer buses and “even less reliable services.”
Bucking National Trend
Melissa Kaplan (at right): Every plan has benefits, drawbacks.
There’s one noticeable omission in that survey: Hamden high schoolers are not offered the opportunity to start school last.
Finances are overtly driving and initiating the current questions on the table. But the issue of youth circadian rhythms has barely entered the conversation.
It’s true that individuals can “write in” in favor of later start times for high schoolers through this survey. But the BOE itself has largely skipped over the issue of systematic, student sleep deprivation while reconsidering how early classes should start.
The common consensus of modern research into teens’ sleep cycles says that once kids hit puberty, their sleeping and waking cycles are delayed. They naturally fall asleep and rise later, which fails to coincide with early school bells and results in, on average, far less sleep than the recommended eight to ten hours. Read more about that in this New York Times article, which also reiterates the results of a Seattle case study that saw students sleeping an additional hour on average after the city moved its high schools’ opening time 55 minutes later, to 8:45 a.m.
“Without a doubt research has made it very clear that older students need more sleep and later start times,” Kaplan conceded.
But she expressed worries that later end-times would specifically disrupt teens’ after school lives, placing high schoolers on different schedules from most of their Connecticut neighbors and thereby interfering with their participation in activities like sports competitions or magnet school programs or even job opportunities.
Kaplan pointed to Guilford High School, which recently opted to start class time just fifteen minutes later — at 7:40 rather than 7:25 — as an example of one district who has struggled with the side effects of a seemingly microscopic schedule change.
Her concern suggests that a multi-district initiative would be most successful in sparking change.
As of 2020, this article states that Connecticut is one of only four states in the nation that on average sets high school start times earlier than 7:45. Connecticut High Schools open on average at 7:39 a.m., while the national average determined in 2017 to 2018 was 8:00 a.m.
But Hamden doesn’t seem to desire to be the first district to interfere with high schoolers’ schedules. Rather, the conversation has largely been a reactive one, with elementary school parents and teachers pushing back against the prospect of sending the district’s youngest students to school even later.
Dana Moras, who has served as a Shepherd Glen kindergarten teacher for the past 15 years, highlighted a number of problems with the plan during a Board of Education meeting that took place last week — including the sleep cycles and energy levels of young kids.
“I have never been able to leave because of the love and passion I have for this town,” she said. But starting elementary schools later, she said, “would be extremely inequitable.”
Students with two working parents would likely have to spend more time in early morning daycare, she posited, which would not only load up the financial burden placed on those parents, but hurt young students “forced to be ‘on’ for a much longer time than their peers.”
“As a kindergarten teacher, I know firsthand how difficult the end of school day in particular is for young students. They are absolutely exhausted by the afternoon. Six-year-olds wake up pretty early,” she stated.
“I have three small children of my own at home,” Moras added. “This time change would make it impossible for me to secure child care for them, especially at this point in time. Since it’s not a financial option, I would have no other choice to leave the district that I have been so proud to call home for so many years.”
“I know many of my colleagues are in the same boat as me,” she stated.
Moras concluded by pointing to Hamden’s “mission statement,” which she said is “making sure students learn to the best of their potential every day.”
While for high schoolers that likely means starting school later, Moras said, young students need to start school earlier, otherwise there will be a “higher risk of burn-out, an increase in difficult behaviors, and the social emotional well-being of students will be at risk.”
Kaplan told the Independent that no plan will be “ideal for everyone,” but hopefully the district can identify an option that will cause “the least amount of disruption and harm to our community.”
“It’s not just funding,” she pointed out, despite the fact that the district originally decided to reorient transportation practices in response to surging busing costs and financial limitations at the municipal level.
Traffic patterns specific to Hamden also shape the issue. Hamden Middle School, for example, poses unique problems due to its narrow layout and location, often delaying buses as they attempt to get in and out of the school campus and reintegrate back into rush hour on Dixwell Avenue. For that reason, starting the middle school last, she suggested, may resolve additional obstacles in getting kids to class on time.
In other words, while sleep cycles, arrival times and dismissal times may all clearly define students’ academic success and mental health, figuring out a way to get kids to school on time and maximize their time in the classroom with fewer buses is the ultimate concern.
“I really feel,” Kaplan reflected, “that every single plan has benefits, but also drawbacks. We can’t assume there’s a one-size-fits-all solution to our challenges, but going forward we need community feedback to make a more informed decision.”