Many Point Loma families are faced with terrible new starting times for our schools next fall.\u00a0 Loma Portal and Sunset View elementary and Dana and Correia middle school families won\u2019t have their children leaving school until nearly 4 p.m.\u00a0 This provides challenges for working parents in the morning. Many families will now be forced to pay extra for before-school childcare so they can drop off their kids and still get to work at a reasonable hour.\u00a0 These hours likely won\u2019t be used for homework, either at daycare or at home.\u00a0 The morning is when kids get up, get set for the day and get going to school.\u00a0 Any members of the school board who are parents should know this. In the afternoon, afterschool activities are now going to have to start later.\u00a0 In the winter, practices will have to be curtailed for outdoor sports.\u00a0 Our son rides his bike to and from school, but it will be too dark during the winter months. Later starts will negatively impact physical fitness for student riders and walkers, increase gas costs for parents who now have to drive their kids and crowd afterschool homework time into the family dinner hour.\u00a0 Additionally, submarine base SSC-HQ, COMTHIRDFLT employees leave the south end of Point Loma at 4 p.m. Now, the San Diego Unified School District board is putting thousands of students on the roads at the same time; seems like a recipe for disaster. I have no doubt the school board and The Beacon are being inundated with information about how ill-informed, short-sighted and potentially dangerous the new school hours are.\u00a0 Pointing out flaws is important, but I would also like to offer two potential solutions that would allow the buses to run efficiently and classes to be held earlier for elementary and middle schools on the Point.\u00a0 I hope the school board would consider either of the following; 1.\u00a0\u00a0Switch Point Loma High School (PLHS, 7:45 a.m. to 2:25 p.m.) and late-start elementary and middle school times. \u00a0It is my understanding that high school students should start later, not earlier in the morning to increase their chances of academic success.\u00a0 They are, presumably, also better able to get themselves to class without adult supervision and many of their afterschool activities are on campus.\u00a0 Why not swap current early high school bus trips with elementary\/middle school trips to Sunset View, Loma Portal, Dana and Correia (which I think are four latest starters in Point Loma)?\u00a0 In other words, why not start high school later and these four schools earlier? 2.\u00a0Elementary schools don\u2019t have training most minimum days.\u00a0 I think all Point Loma schools have Thursday minimum days.\u00a0 They end nearly three hours early.\u00a0 Why not eliminate minimum days and end each day 30 minutes earlier (3 hours = 180 minutes divided by 5 days a week = 36 minutes a day, rounded down to 30 minutes a day)?\u00a0 Let teachers train before school on the occasions they need to.\u00a0 Currently, at least Marshall Middle School in Scripps Ranch doesn\u2019t have weekly minimum days, so the idea must be doable.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure there are other ways to meet these challenges.\u00a0 I hope the school board will consider my and other parents\u2019 proposals and bring some reasonableness to bell times in Point Loma.\u00a0 Surely the school board can find a way to avoid endangering children on our streets, curtailing time for homework and family dinners, allowing fewer opportunities for extracurricular interests, stressing parent work schedules during this challenging economy and increasing childcare costs. \u2014 Kirk Mather is a substitute teacher from Point Loma.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Many Point Loma families are faced with terrible new starting times for our schools next fall.\u00a0 Loma Portal and Sunset View elementary and Dana and Correia middle school families won\u2019t have their children leaving school until nearly 4 p.m.\u00a0 This provides challenges for working parents in the morning. Many families will now be forced to […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11561","_seopress_titles_title":"Better ideas for our school start\/end times","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11593,11552,11561,11550],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-no-images","category-opinion","category-peninsula-beacon","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}