FT 19.11 School Day Restructuring Act (Statute)

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

This bill was inspired by a comment by the honorable member from Washington, to the effect that later school start times are in the interest of students' health and parents' convenience. Accordingly, this bill would establish a Standard School Day of 9:30 to 4:30 for elementary students and 9 to 4 for upper grades, while allowing schools to apply for a special exemption from the Ministry of Education if local concerns would make a different schedule better for that community.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Doesn’t this make the bus system less efficient? My HS started at 7 AM for that reason.

Could you elaborate? I'm not sure why we couldn't just adjust the bus schedules.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I'm not sure what the current school day is. Would making the SSD 8:30-3:30 and the EASSD 9:30-4:30 fix the bus issue?

It'd make it less bad but a school bus could still not pick up 3 separate grade levels at once.

Also one thing to keep in mind is some rural school districts (including a few in rural Nevada) do 4 day school days and make each school day longer (by 60-70 mins or so) so with a strict start and end time, that'd no longer be possible.

One more feasible remedy is prohibiting the school day from starting say earlier than 8AM and not bothering to legislate the end time.

§4 allows districts to apply for a special exemption to the SSD/EASSD. If rural districts want to continue a four day school week with longer hours, I would be happy to instruct the Ministry of Education to approve such requests. The compromise proposed by the honorable member from Nevada works as well.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

As stated previously I am willing to accept this compromise if it is what the house wants, but if this amendment is adopted there will need to be significant structural changes to the bill before it is ready for passage. For instance, I am absolutely opposed to allowing schools to begin before 8 am, so the new §3 would have to go.

I would like to hear what ASV thinks of this before acceding to the amendment, as this was originally his idea.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I had interpreted ASV's post as offering an objection, but in any event we should get the ball rolling with this again.

I would have liked to hear from the other members; while as I said I'm willing to accept a compromise, I do prefer the original bill and think 8 am is a little early for elementary students and adolescents —depending on bus routs this could still effectively require them to be up before 7 am.

If the House still prefers YE's amendment, I will offer a significant revision of the language before this moves to a final vote, as it is not really a Standard School Day if we are merely mandating a start time, and there is no need for the original §4 if we are merely limiting schools' ability to begin session before 8 am.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

That's fair enough. My primary concern in drafting this bill was for students' health and parents' convenience. If we need to increase aid to low-income families so that they are not reliant on the income earned by their high school-aged children, perhaps that is something we should consider.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

That could be an interesting idea. Did you have something in mind?

I am not sure. I guess we could determine what need was met by high school students as a first step, but perhaps that should be its own bill.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Aye.