The Nevada State Board of Education is weighing the importance of local control versus alignment of community needs in its debate about school start times after holding recent workshops on the topic.
Board members reviewed public comment from various stakeholders at this month’s board meeting and provided feedback on the direction they hoped to proceed on a resolution to come during July’s meeting. In a round robin style, board President Felicia Ortiz asked members to review comments they had received from workshops held in March and April as well as any proposed language that could be drafted for the Legislative Counsel Bureau regulation hearing next month.
The Nevada Department of Education previously held discussions to adjust school start times as a possible means of keeping students from falling behind in school due to lack of sleep, transportation needs or extracurricular or scheduling needs. The National Sleep Foundation has recommended delaying start times to approximately 8:30 a.m., but rural school district transportation departments typically report they don’t have the buses or drivers to transport the students sufficiently in one route at the times, with many making double routes or some picking up students as early as 6 a.m. to drop off children at the proper start time.
Carson City School Board member and Lyon County School District Principal Mike Walker said after speaking with his colleagues among the Nevada Association of School Boards recently in Las Vegas, they believed it should up to local control.
“There’s a lot of moving pieces to this,” he said. “In Carson, I talked about, speaking with our associate superintendent, there’s a lot of schools who do not have adequate lighting for our (football) field, and if you push those secondary schools later, athletes are going to miss more academic time.
“Safety wise … pushing the middle schools and high schools later is going to require pushing the elementary schools back earlier,” he said. “We’re going to wind up with children crossing Carson Street without lit streets.”
Walker also talked about local employers who rely on teenage workers needing to report for their 1 to 3 p.m. shifts, and he said the state board hasn’t adequately assessed the impact to communities.
Churchill County Superintendent Summer Stephens worried there would be “unintended consequences” to a regulation.
“I’m concerned this is a Clark County issue,” she said. “I have kids that get on the bus at 6:30 a.m. regardless of whether they start at 8 or 8:30 a.m. I don’t have enough drivers to run the routes we have. The local control piece we have is important. There are 194 responses (from the workshops). That’s next to no one in the state of Nevada.”
Jobs for Nevada’s Graduates Executive Director René Cantú said perhaps the state board could “walk some middle path” in its decision.
“Stakeholders and communities, they’re all very important, but we need to safeguard and look at what’s best for students,” he said.
Ortiz said the board would work with the NDE and once the regulation hearing is held, the public would have another opportunity to provide comment before it is finalized.