Schenectady schools to start earlier in fall

Teenagers will have to drag themselves out of bed 15 minutes earlier this fall to save the Schenectady school district money.

The district will save $110,000 by starting the high school and the middle schools slightly earlier by consolidating and reducing bus runs. The schools will start at 7:30 a.m.

As a reward, students will get out earlier, too. School will end each day at 2:35 p.m.

The morning routine will get a little easier for younger children — they will start school 15 minutes later this year in a move that is intended to give teachers more time to prepare individualized lesson plans to keep students from falling through the cracks academically.

All of the city’s elementary schools will start at 9 a.m., rather than 8:45 a.m. The school day will end at 3:15 p.m.

It is a change from the recent extension of the elementary school day, which was designed to give students more instructional time. Superintendent John Yagielski said the additional time was not used effectively by many elementary teachers last year. Some allowed students to play with toys when the children ran out of steam near the end of the school day.

Instead, Yagielski said, the students would be best served by better-prepared teachers.

So rather than bringing the students to school early, the teachers will use that time as a planning period, he said. Before the children arrive each morning, teachers will have a half-hour to meet with mentors, work on lesson plans and brainstorm ways to reach every student.

Yagielski wants them to catch students as soon as they start to fall behind — when they only need to relearn one concept, rather than half a year’s work that had been built on that concept.

He also wants them to focus on reading, a critical skill that he said needs to be taught better in Schenectady’s early grades.

The biggest change in the schedule comes at the K-8 schools, where the starting bells had been staggered so that young children were in class before the older children arrived for the day. Principals said they had worried the older children would bully the younger ones, or lead them into mischievous behavior.

But the number of infractions plummeted in the new K-8 schools, particularly among the seventh and eighth graders.

Principals said the older students seemed to try to be on their best behavior in front of the impressionable elementary school students.

Yagielski said there was no need to stagger the starting times any longer — and busing everyone to school at the same time would allow the district to use fewer buses.

The change will give those elementary school students a 30-minute longer school day, while the middle school students will have 20 minutes less than they would have at the city’s traditional middle schools.

The Central Park and Martin Luther King K-8 schools will start at 8:15 a.m. and dismiss students at 3 p.m.

The district’s special program for middle school students who have failed a grade, the Blodgett Success Academy, will run from 7:45 a.m. to 2:20 p.m.

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