http://wtop.com/149/3608367/Later-school-start-times-for-Fairfax-Co

Students at Fairfax County Public Schools may be able to sleep a little longer if the school board approves a proposal that would push back the school start time.

On Wednesday, Children's National Medical Center will present four action plans to Fairfax County's School Board on how to adjust schedules to allow high school students to report to class between 30 minutes to an hour later by as early as September 2015, according to The Washington Post.

The proposals are based upon a year-long study by researchers at Children's National Medical Center. That study, according to The Post, finds that 55 percent of Fairfax County teens get less than six hours of sleep a night when experts recommend teens get at least nine hours of sleep.

ABOUT TIME !!!

Finally we will have a school system that is NOT run by the bus drivers.

How about telling the little shits to go to bed earlier, maybe one hour earlier?

I guess you missed the part where this cost at least $12 million to implement. And elementary kids will now get up around 6:30, but I guess you don't care about that either.

LouderthanHell Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> http://wtop.com/149/3608367/Later-school-start-tim
> es-for-Fairfax-Co
>
> Students at Fairfax County Public Schools may be
> able to sleep a little longer if the school board
> approves a proposal that would push back the
> school start time.
>
> On Wednesday, Children's National Medical Center
> will present four action plans to Fairfax County's
> School Board on how to adjust schedules to allow
> high school students to report to class between 30
> minutes to an hour later by as early as September
> 2015, according to The Washington Post.
>
> The proposals are based upon a year-long study by
> researchers at Children's National Medical Center.
> That study, according to The Post, finds that 55
> percent of Fairfax County teens get less than six
> hours of sleep a night when experts recommend
> teens get at least nine hours of sleep.
>
> ABOUT TIME !!!
>
> Finally we will have a school system that is NOT
> run by the bus drivers.

Teens bodies dont go to sleep early they stay up late - it just the way it is. That said this will be quite hard on logistics. Getting kids there early allowed lots of after school activities that will now have to go into the evening due to late release.

Overall I favor later starts.

I've been fighting these efforts for years. While later starts may benefit some high school kids, they are likely to have a negative impact on others. For many their education starts when they leave school. Any change which takes away afternoon time from them will limit their ability to engage in activities they find meaningful. For still others the change will have no impact, because a later start time will simply mean a later bed time. What's more the impact of every plan floated to date was not limited just to high school kids. They have all involved significant negative impacts on kids attending elementary school or middle school, such as forcing them to start school earlier or end much later.

That said my youngest will graduate this spring. So now this is someone else's fight.

This shit's just getting ridiculous. They ALREADY RAN THIS SHIT by parents several years ago and they were overwhelmingly AGAINST the proposal. NO ONE wanted their elementary kids getting home at 2pm when there's zero daycare available (a lot of parents, especially in the poorer communities rely on older siblings to care for the younger ones). NO ONE wanted elementary school kids standing at the busstop at 5:30am. NO ONE wanted middle schoolers starting at 9:30 and being in school until 4:30 which meant getting HOME at 5:30 if you were one of the last students off the bus.

No one cares that your stupid high schooler can't go to bed on time except you. I've got 2 in high school now and one that just graduated. They are in bed by 10 most nights, sometimes 9:30. They get plenty of sleep.

Pushing back high school start times by 30 minutes makes ZERO difference in their sleep except to fuck everyone else over in the process.

If you REALLY think your high school kids needs more sleep, it is the HIGH SCHOOLS that should be starting at 9:30, not the middle schools. But no one wants to do that b/c they all know that kids would pitch a fit if they couldn't participate in sports or hold their after school jobs. So instead, they do some piddly little 30 minute time difference that makes no impact overall just to appease a whiny group of helicopter parents and they shift the burden of that change onto the rest of us.

The fact of the matter is, Fairfax County is too big to implement something like this effectively because of how much it costs. They SHOULD just run buses simultaneously so that everyone is getting to school somewhere around 8/8:30 but because that would mean a massive amount of cash to pay for more buses and more bus drivers, it'll never happen.

I'll be pissed as shit if my elementary kid has to start getting up at 5:30 am just because the county had to appease some bitch ass parents.

How about the kids put down their phones at a decent time and actually go to sleep rather than sitting up all night texting or checking how many 'likes' they are getting on some inane comment they posted on Twitter?

They did this in Loudoun a few years after I graduated. Kids weren't getting home until 5. That sounds fucking dreadful. I loved getting our early. I'd get home, do my homework, and then still have time to GO OUTSIDE.

If the start time gets pushed back an hour, the kids will just go to bed an hour later. They will still be sleep deprived.

It's the same thing that happens in the summer. Kids go to bed at 3am and get used to waking up at noon as the body adapts.

The affordable plans are not acceptable to the community. The expensive plans are not acceptable to the taxpayer. End of story.

But do keep in mind that the current system did not simply fall from the sky. It was developed as -- and has been amended to continue to be -- an optimal compromise between many complex and often competing demands. It is already at least very nearly the best plan that rational minds could come up with. Meanwhile, the school system is short of funds and facing serious budget deficits. After Greyhound, FCPS already has the largest fleet of buses in the country. But now we are told that we need to buy, equip, maintain, and staff 108 more? For what again? As has been pointed out already, claims that high schoolers would be given more needed sleep under these plans are a complete and transparent crock of crap. All these plans do is shift school start times around. That's ALL they do. It is INDIVIDUAL HIGH SCHOOLERS who would decide whether or not they would get any more sleep as the result of such things, and the overwhelming odds lie with NOT. Let's realize that every kid in the county ALREADY HAS the option of getting more sleep simply by going to bed earlier. They don't do it. Kids of HS and college age delight in existing on as little sleep as possible. It's who they are. It's what they do. These stupid plans are not going to change them in the slightest. The clucking go-gooder polyannas and mother-hens behind all this rot and nonsense are simply a waste of everyone else's time and money. And no, please don't tell me again about your studies from some village in the Wyoming wilderness that barely has 10,000 people in it, much less nearing 200,000 students. Useless garbage doesn't impress me very much. Perhaps everyone would LIKE school start times to be different from what they are, just as everyone would LIKE rush hour traffic to be different from what it is. But it takes workable and affordable comprehensive plans to do those sorts of things, and no one has yet come up with any such thing.

The School Board will no doubt seek to shut the traps of the yammering obnoxious ninnies by voting to "move forward" with some plan or other from the big manilla envelope of ineffectual plans. And the chosen plan will then no doubt wander through the by-ways and backwaters of administrative procedure until such time as it can finally be scrapped as being outdated and unworkable wth a new commission then being appointed to fulfill the Board's promise by studying the problem and in due time putting forward a new round of balanced proposals to deal with the situation. That's about the best outcome for all of us that can be hoped for here.

Only a handful if loud whiners want this. Stop the madness

LouderthanHell Wrote:
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> Finally we will have a school system that is NOT
> run by the bus drivers.


This statement is laughable.

The last people the school system listens to is bus drivers.

Hell, most of them don't even speak English!

Where the hell are they going to get all these additional bus drivers? They don't have enough now.

My elementary kids our on their third driver since school started. The previous two told me goodbye and said they were resigning. That's one bus with three drivers SO FAR this year. My high school kid has a different driver almost every day, so obviously they're using substitutes or supervisors on that run.

It must be a horrible job to have that kind of turnover.