By:Doug Miller
The Board of Education is considering a proposal to give all the elementary schools the same starting time, and start classes at the high school and middle schools after the sun rises.
The district will be purchasing a number of new school buses in the coming months, and officials are trying to decide how many and how best to use them. Every study they have done shows that there are more efficient ways of busing students than the current model, and nearly all suggest changing school starting times.
It takes special people to pore through piles of school bus route data and figure out what it's telling them. So Long Beach hired LPS services -- from Montana, of all places -- to do it. A boiled-down version of their findings was presented to the public at Tuesday's Board of Education meeting, breaking down several strategies for getting kids to and from school as quickly, safely and cheaply as possible. An extended version of this Rubik's cube of data can be found in a 26-page report available on the school district's Web site (www.lbeach.org.)
The scenario that seems to be the favorite includes starting all the elementary schools at 9 a.m. and ending them at 3:30 p.m. The secondary schools would run from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Pre-kindergarten would run from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. and 11:30 to 2:30 p.m. Long Beach Catholic Regional School, which participates in the district's busing matrix, would run from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
This scenario would require three additional buses and cost the district $115,000 to implement, mostly in salaries for the additional drivers.
Board Trustee Roy Lester said that starting the secondary schools later would produce fewer sleep-deprived students. "This is the only proposed scenario with proven educational benefits," Lester said Tuesday night.
An important issue is the nature of Long Beach, which boasts a large number of commuting parents. Concerns were raised that getting young children to school later would inconvenience parents.
The district currently provides bus service to six public schools, one in-district private school and several out-of-district private schools. The school day runs from 7:30 a.m. to 2:25 p.m. for the middle and high schools, from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. for three of the elementary schools, and from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. for the remaining elementary school, Lindell.
While no changes may ever be enacted, the report had four goals: to create a viable two-tiered route schedule instead of the current three, to see if it's possible to start the high school and middle school later in the morning, to get all the elementary schools on the same schedule and to test all the schedules and see what they cost.
The report outlines several scenarios, based on the district's current total of 41 bus routes.
n If all the elementary schools began at 8:30 a.m. and ran until 3 p.m., the result would be 48 morning routes and 53 afternoon routes.
n If a 3:30 dismissal time for Long Beach Catholic is figured into the above scenario, the result would be 48 morning routes and 47 afternoon routes. (There are currently six bus runs for Long Beach Catholic.) The report notes that extending the Catholic school day by 30 minutes or moving the start and finish times 30 minutes forward would produce the same results.
n If all the elementary schools ran from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and the bus runs were consolidated to maximize their efficiency, the result would be 42 routes in the morning and 47 in the afternoon.
n With all elementary schools operating from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., the routes consolidated as above and the Catholic school dismissal moved to 3:30 p.m., the result would be 42 morning routes and 41 afternoon.
n Using those results, the report states that it is possible for the secondary schools to start 10 minutes later, at 7:40 a.m., and for the elementary schools to start at 8:35 a.m.
n The report described another option: swapping the secondary and elementary school start times. This would require 45 morning and as many as 59 afternoon runs, unless one high school bus run is cut and the need for elementary after-school activity buses is decreased, in which case this option would require 44 morning and afternoon runs. This scenario would not impact Long Beach Catholic.
