Right now, it appears Unionville-Chadds Ford may be only district pushing for change
By Mike McGann, Editor, The Times
There has been increasing talk about changing the start time for middle and high schools in Chester County — driven largely out of Unionville — part of a larger dialogue going on nationally.
While its clear that the science supports such a move — teens seem to have built-in time clocks that make them want to stay awake later and, in turn, sleep later (which shocks exactly zero parents of teenagers) — the logistics of the issue are a far stickier issue.
As the parent of two sophomores at Unionville High School (and having just completed my term as president of the Unionville-Chadds Ford Education Foundation), I’ve gotten a lot of questions in recent weeks about this issue, some curious and mildly supportive, others from parents worried about unintended consequences.
This fact might shock some who know me, but when it comes to education, I’m a pretty conservative person.
This comes from my own schooling in Northern New Jersey in the 1970s — in a school district that embraced just about every wacky educational fad that came down the pike. I endured “team teaching” (60 kids, three teachers, no one in charge and chaos), open schools (my district built a building with no walls — just curtain dividers, which had to be completely refitted with walls when it became what the kids today call an “epic fail”) an a host of other “innovations” — split sessions in third grade because of botched planning on student population — that littered the landscape with smoking educational wreckage.
That experience and subsequent time covering public schools taught me to take such highly touted innovations with a Mack Truck-sized grain of salt.
So, yes, I have a healthy amount of skepticism about the idea. I grant my own kids would likely benefit — but I worry about the impact on younger students and whether this is the biggest scheduling issue for high school students.
Frankly, my daughter suggests the current school schedule at Unionville High School is a bigger problem, with 28 minutes for lunch and never enough time to use the restroom between periods because of the tight schedule (not to mention the physical impact of having to lug around the entire day’s textbooks in a backpack — when either better in-school scheduling or digital textbooks would solve the problem). Both of those issues can be fixed without district-wide disruption and should be higher priorities.
The concept of the time change is laudable for middle and high school students, but fraught with concerns.
Should the district swap the start time of elementary and secondary students, it would present a lot of problems.
First, sending five year olds out in the dark to the bus during the late fall and winter sounds like a really bad idea. Second, in many families, older secondary students are expected to provide child-care for their younger elementary school students. Forcing those families into using Y-Care or some other childcare solution is an undue burden and an effective tax hike. Third, there is no evidence that any other school in Chester County is ready to join Unionville is such a move.
While there have been some suggestions by Unionville district sources that Treydiffrin/Easttown is seriously looking at it, in actuality, there appears to be little to no enthusiasm for the subject there or anywhere else, based on informal conversations I’ve had with folks around the county. A change would complicate students attending Technical High School programming, not to mention interscholastic sports and other after school activities.
Less problematic is the concept of pushing the entire school district schedule back 30 minutes — which eliminates the child care issue as well as that of little kids waiting for the bus in the dark. This still creates some scheduling issues with the CCIU and after school activities, but they would be lesser than with the other option.
Still, it is concerning that there appears to be a lack of a local coalition of school districts — one district cannot really do this alone — moving toward this. It may make sense to slow this discussion down and see if more of the county’s school districts are willing to get on board.
At this point, Unionville is aiming to make a decision in February, 2017 on whether to make changes for the 2017-18 school year. As the vast majority of the school community — not to mention neighboring school communities — aren’t even entirely aware that this is on tap, it would make sense to slow the process down, bring more districts into a wider conversation and look deeply into the logistical concerns.
