By Khalida Sarwari
Whether the Saratoga High School community likes it or not, the bell schedule that’s proposed to be implemented at the school starting this fall is here to stay.
Los Gatos-Saratoga Joint Union High School District superintendent Bob Mistele made that much clear this week in response to an outcry from parents, students, teachers and administrators at recent town hall meetings and on websites like Change.org.
“We plan to implement the bell schedules at both schools as it now stands and monitor the impact and effectiveness of the schedules,” Mistele said in an email on Feb. 9.
The schedule was initially unveiled to the school community in January following a 3-2 vote by the school district board of trustees and was immediately met with concern, anger and confusion.
Mistele maintains that his reasoning for the schedule change is that he wanted to align the bell schedules across the district’s two high schools.
As it currently stands, the proposed schedule–referred to as a “rolling block” schedule–features a later start time (8:15 a.m., as opposed to the current start time of 7:50 a.m.) and includes 90-minute block periods, 35-minute daily tutorials, and most significantly for the students, a 35-minute lunch.
“Our primary goal,” said the superintendent, “is always what’s best for kids. There has been a lot of concern about student stress and the research shows a later start can positively impact that.”
Continued Mistele, “We also heard loud and clear that there were concerns about the homework/test overload on Mondays at Saratoga caused by the skinny Monday,” referring to the current Monday schedule where students have seven 47-minute class periods.
Students, however, have implied that their superintendent and board of trustees aren’t listening to them. A number of them appeared at a board meeting on Feb. 2 to complain that their input wasn’t being considered. Parents, too, expressed concern about shortened instructional minutes and an initially proposed but now scrapped 8:40 a.m. start time that they said would conflict with Redwood Middle School’s start time, thus causing traffic and problems for parents with students that attend both schools.
Acknowledging these concerns, Mistele said he has made some concessions.
“There was also a lot of talk about a lack of trust, and in an effort to rebuild that trust and demonstrate that that segment of the community had been heard, I decided to make some adjustments,” he said.
As part of those changes, he said five minutes were added to each instructional block (initially the board had recommended 85-minute blocks) and the start time was moved to 8:15 a.m.
Over the coming weeks, there will be more opportunities for the Saratoga High community to weigh in on the schedule change issue.
Link: Saratoga High School stands firm on new bell schedule despite outcry
