Education Week - February 26, 2020 - 17

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What's in the Way
of Change?
By Mark Lieberman

A growing body of research provides evidence
that schools can benefit from rethinking their
schedules, whether by pushing the start time to
later in the day, eliminating one day a week, or

Concerns and objections from parents
A significant change in the
timing of the school day could
force parents to alter their
work schedules or put them in
a logistical bind when it comes to
pickup and drop-off, especially
when someone needs to be home
to watch children before and after the school day. Those
challenges can be particularly acute for parents and
guardians who live apart. And even without obvious
logistical hurdles, parents often resist tweaking ritual
and tradition.

Chris Fiedler, the superintendent of School District
27J in northeast Colorado, got firsthand experience
navigating parents' emotions when he led several
meetings in advance of the district's decision to start
high school early in 2017, and again, to move to a fourday week in 2018 amid budget cuts.
"The first meeting, they were ready to riot," Fiedler
said. They later came around, he said, but not before
a new approach to soliciting community feedback in
person: "It was trying to be humorous, but we told
them, if you want to yell at us, yell on your feedback
sheets."

otherwise reshuffling how students and teachers
spend their time together.
Before districts and schools can pull the trigger
on a massive change, though, they're likely to face
a wide variety of obstacles and barriers. Some of
them are merely a byproduct of well-established
norms and traditions around schooling, including
an outdated agrarian calendar. Others reflect
deeper insecurities among groups of people with
a stake in the success of a school's approach.
Education Week talked to school leaders
who have attempted with varying degrees of
success to rethink schedules, and to advocates
and organizations that work with schools on
facilitating significant change. Barriers to those
changes tend to fall in the following six categories:

Athletics and extracurriculars
Though they're ancillary to the
core of the school day, after-school
activities play a major role in the daily
lives of students and the formation of
local communities. Sports, band, and theater schedules
are often set by institutions distinct from the schools
themselves, necessitating ample practice and rehearsal
time outside school hours. Pushing those activities later
in the day, for instance, can leave students with less
time than they'd otherwise have to complete
homework and get adequate rest.
In 2017, then-Superintendent Tommy Chang of the

Staff and support staff
Teachers approach planning their lessons by filling the available time they
have. If that amount of time changes, teachers might balk at having to come
up with a new approach to covering the material. A schedule change can be
even stickier if it substantially changes teachers' hours or responsibilities,
which could mean a lengthy renegotiation of a teachers' union contract and a
testy battle over a wide range of specifics.
Meanwhile, support staff, from sanitation and culinary workers to bus
drivers and crossing guards, can feel the effects of a schedule change-and if those workers aren't
full-time employees, a small shift in their hours and duties can make a major difference in their
well-being.
Though teacher objections are an obstacle, the conditions in which most teachers
work are inherently hostile to innovation, argues Bryan Hassel, the co-president of Public
Impact, a nonprofit working with school districts to help them make better use of time. He
advocates more collaboration to cut down on wasted time and redundancy during the school day.
"If the teachers on the team see themselves as a team working together with these 100 kids, ...
there's much more of a chance to say, 'I can specialize in what I do best; together we'll do better
than we would at each time by ourselves,' " Hassel said.

Boston school district proposed an ambitious plan to
start many schools later and align start times across
the district. The effort failed for a variety of reasons,
including some he didn't anticipate.
"A lot of the nonprofit programming for after school
specifically was tied to specific schools. So when
a school changes the start time, the end time also
changes, thus the nonprofits were also being affected,"
Chang said. "We were thinking about our immediate
end users, clientele, and stakeholders. Nonprofits are a
secondary stakeholder group."

Transportation

Policy mandates

If school starts at a
different time from before,
it's no simple matter
to rearrange bus
schedules accordingly.
Many districts have a
fixed number of available buses that have
to run on a strict timetable to meet the
demands of various schools. Some districts
even share buses with other districts, further
complicating logistics.
When former New Jersey Gov. Chris
Christie in 2014 pushed school districts in
the state to consider revising start times,
the Freehold Regional High School district
came up against a fairly concrete obstacle,
according to Superintendent Charles
Sampson.
"We have six high schools. We run
them on different start-time schedules to
accommodate our tiered busing. We met
with state officials to take a look at going
to one uniform later start date," Sampson
said. "When we dug into it, it looked like
it was going to be an additional $9 to $10
million in busing costs. It was purely a
financial barrier-$9 to $10 million wasn't
materializing out of thin air."

The codified
rules at the
district, local,
and even
state levels
can stand in the way of rethinking
schedules. Fixed dates for state
testing leave schools with limited
opportunities to radically reshape the
structure of the school year. Statemandated caps on class size and the
amount of time students spend with
nonteaching personnel can thwart
plans to engage students differently
throughout the day.
Smaller districts with minimal
resources feel the effects of certain
policies particularly strongly. John
Unger, the principal of West Fork
Middle School in Arkansas, said his
school is required by the state to offer
music classes to all 8th graders, but
his middle school shares its music
teacher with the high school. "If we
only have one hour a day that teacher
is available, we're stuck, we're
handcuffed to what we can offer,"
Unger said.

Isabel Espanol for Education Week

Cost of change
Even if everybody involved wants to make a change, finding the time and money to plan and execute it is another
matter entirely. Many school districts lack the budget and resources to devote to planning a complex
operation. Some school districts have failed to garner public support for changing the schedule because no nearby
school systems have done something similar. Leadership is a factor as well-building trust with parents and teachers
takes years, which means a new administrative team can't simply sweep in and make enormous changes right off
the bat.
Jennifer Davis, the president and co-founder of the National Center for Time and Learning, has seen in her
organization's recent advocacy work more enthusiasm for deviating from the norm-but not without relevant
nearby examples.
"That ability to network, to ask advice, to look at data, to learn from others that are holding similar roles in the
community is hugely valuable," Davis said. "The comfort level is much higher when you can go to visit a district that
has already done it for a school."
EDUCATION WEEK | February 26, 2020 | www.edweek.org | 17

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Education Week - February 26, 2020

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