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Date: 5/16/2023
NORTHAMPTON — The Northampton School Committee decided to maintain the current school start times with the Northampton Public School district for at least another year.
Understanding the different factors surrounding this topic, the majority of the committee also tasked the curriculum subcommittee with gathering data from families and administrators to see how they feel about the current school start times as well as what issues they may face. The hope is to use this data to inform future discussions for future school years.
After years of discussing the topic, the School Committee voted back in 2020 to shift school start times around so the high school would start at 9 a.m. instead of its previous time of 7:30 a.m. The shift also meant that elementary schools would start at 8 a.m. instead of 8:50 a.m. and the middle school students would start at 8:30 a.m. instead of 7:55 a.m.
Now, after almost two full school years under these new times, the committee is planning to conduct more conversations throughout the district about where the community stands on the issue.
In an abbreviated survey presented at the School Committee’s April 13 meeting, which included 742 responses, 45% of students at JFK Middle School and the high school said the current school start times are desirable while 27 percent said the times are very desirable. Meanwhile, around 28 percent said the times are undesirable and 11 percent said they are very undesirable.
“The question was looking to see if there was any strong compelling reason to change [the times] right away, I don’t see that so my recommendation, along with member [Michael] Stein and member [Gwen] Agna, is to keep the start time in place as it is,” said Ward 7 member Kaia Goleman, who presented the survey as part of the Budget & Property subcommittee during the April 13 meeting.
Even with this data, the committee agreed during the May 11 meeting that much more information needs to be gathered before any significant changes are made. The hope is to have a conversation with high school principal Bill Wehrli about how the current start time is impacting athlete’s schedules.
“It is very clear that there are so many pieces of components to this,” said Goleman, of the start time issue. “We don’t need a thousand decisions to be made now; we need to start just sticking with it in a systematic way and not moving too quickly.”
Agna and Goleman were the only two to vote no for the motion. Agna argued that the motion focused too much on the high school and not enough on the other schools.
“I think this issue has such implications and impacts on all the children in Northampton schools,” Agna said. “That is curriculum, that is social-emotional, that is well-being. It is everything.”
Goleman, meanwhile, felt that a plan could be hashed out more before the curriculum subcommittee embarks on the data-collecting. “I think this is something that can touch back with the full committee to make a decision about the plan on how to move forward, and then go forward with that plan,” Goleman said.
The School Committee agreed that incoming superintendent Portia Bonner must be updated on the history of this issue so she can contribute to the conversation and assist with the future decision-making when the time comes.
“I think someone is going to have to look at a history of this topic,” Miller said. “I think some of that material needs to be looked at as part of this process because it’s been debated and discussed for centuries.”