Many Fresno-area schools are changing bell schedules. It’s a challenge for teachers, parents
After years of debate, schools in the Fresno area and across California must change their bell schedules to allow teens more time to sleep.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation in 2019 saying middle school classes cannot start before 8 a.m. and high school classes cannot start before 8:30 a.m. The law takes effect for this upcoming school year.
While there are families excited about the later start, most Clovis Unified School District teachers and families wanted to keep start times as they were, district spokesperson Kelly Avants said.
But that wasn’t an option. The district had to change nearly all its school start times, even elementary schools, to accommodate pushing back the bell times for its secondary schools, she said.
“Because we are a K-12 district and we share resources across our campuses — buses, campus catering, bus drivers, custodial — it required us to look at all of our scheduling,” Avants said.
Because the Clovis community recognizes the changes had to happen, their concerns are about how the changes will be implemented and how it will impact families.
Fresno Unified did not provide information requested for this story.
However, on Aug. 4, the district held a news conference in which Superintendent Bob Nelson said most of the district’s schools already comply with the state mandate.
Only seven high schools had to push their start times back, according to FUSD.
Almost all of Clovis Unified schedules changing
As a result of the law, school districts have had to grapple with elementary school schedules.
Clovis Unified had two options for its elementary schools: Move their start time before or after the secondary schools’ later times.
And it needed feedback from families. The district held community meetings at each of its schools in spring 2021.
From the community meetings, the district learned that most families wanted elementary schools to start earlier than the secondary grades, Avants said.
With school times as they are now, most high schools start and end earlier than elementary schools, so teenagers can be home with younger siblings while both parents work, Avant said.
Not only did Clovis Unified’s middle and high school times change to meet the state mandate, but elementary grades shifted to be before those times.
The requirement for at least six hours of instruction, which often equals about eight hours a day of school with lunch and other breaks, remains the same. So school could go from ending at about 2:45 p.m. to about 3:30 pm.
The Clovis Unified bell schedules can be found here. Central Unified also had to change most of its bell schedules, which can be found here. Fresno Unified School District, the third largest in the state, has posted its bell schedules on their school websites.
Health organization say school starts too early
The schedule changes were spurred, in part, by national studies, notably from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy for Pediatrics, showing that many teenagers are sleep-deprived, which affects their safety and academic success.
Those studies and others since 2014 have shown later school start times can improve grades and behavior.
The AAP recommends kids ages 13 to 18 year old sleep between eight and 10 hours, yet less than a third of high schoolers are getting that on school nights.
The AAP has recommended that middle and high schools start at 8:30 a.m. or later to give students the opportunity to get the amount of sleep they need.
New bell schedules lead to new challenges
Beyond students’ sleep needs, there are many other factors to consider when it comes to school start times.
“There are simply far too many local factors to consider when deciding our school start times,” the California Teachers Association said in a call-out to Newsom before the bill became law. The CTA was the legislation’s biggest opponent.
Some factors affecting districts’ changing the bell schedules include:
Transportation
District resources
The start time for athletics, since school end time would be pushed back. The later the start time, the later school athletics will be.
How K-8 and K-12 schools would operate.
The new schedules have posed transportation challenges for Clovis Unified. Clovis Unified has test-run its bus routes, which run for elementary kids first, then secondary grades. The district learned that many elementary students who live far from their campuses will have to be picked up earlier than they were, Avants said.
The bus schedules will be published about two weeks before the district starts classes on Aug. 22.
They’ve also posed issues for sporting events. While charter schools, K-8 schools and K-12 schools would need to make the change, rural districts are exempt from the law. That exemption and the inconsistencies it causes impact different schools, especially in athletics.
Schools have to consider how having potentially different ending times could impact playing against teams from different schools or leagues, Avants said a year ago. Students may miss some school time if they have to leave class to play a game.
““Every school district has different resources available to it, so I think the challenges stem from that,“ Avants said Thursday. “In the state of California, while a lot of schools are having to change, there is a big exemption in that law for rural schools, which presents challenges. You have schools starting inconsistently across the state.”
This story was originally published July 25, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Many Fresno-area schools are changing bell schedules. It’s a challenge for teachers, parents."
