Alina Klaehn ‘22 Fiona Riley ‘22
EA instituted six delayed openings throughout this school year in order to provide time for department meetings. On these six days, homeroom will begin at 9:00 and all classes and activities will be pushed later by one hour. After classes end, students will go right to sports and miss domino block entirely.
Last year, EA’s middle and upper school academic departments consolidated in an effort to give a more cohesive curriculum throughout the transition from Middle to Upper school. These delays will give the academic departments a chance to meet as a whole despite scheduling differences, without sacrificing full school days. “I think the delays will be a good thing this year,” says Michael Letts, Head of Upper School. “The purpose was to provide common time for MS and US faculty members to meet with their departments. With our different sports, chapel, lunch, and activity/office hour schedules, this is the only way we can get all MS and US faculty members together at one time.”
Letts also mentioned how these changes will affect students. “I think it may help students. Granted it’s only about seven times this academic year, but an hour is better than nothing. I think it helps everyone. It provides time for faculty to meet and provides students with a little extra time to rest.” Michael Whalen, Upper School history and religion teacher agree says that the meetings were “a great opportunity for teachers from the Middle and Upper School to get together and work on a variety of objectives while also getting to know each other better. Furthermore, it’s a great chance for students to catch up on some sleep.”
These changes, however, have affected students in unintentional ways. On the first delayed day of the year, Wednesday, September 25, some students commented on the overall flow of this different schedule. “I think it’s a good idea in general,” says Cayla Beaulieu ‘20, “but they could have executed it better. I think these days should not have chapel, long block, or flex. If they took these out, we could end at a normal time.” Other students agreed that on these days, there shouldn’t be so much free time. Julia Memmo ’22 states, “Since it’s only going to be for six days a year, I don’t think it would be a big deal to leave some things out of the schedule on those days. The day already seemed longer just because everything was pushed back by an hour. I think another thing that made it kind of tiring was not having domino before sports.” Jill McEntee ‘21 shared this sentiment. “It was hard to manage your meetings.” She adds, “I’m lucky I didn’t have flex that day, but I think it was definitely hard for people who did because they weren’t used to eating later. They ate at their normal time and were starving by the time it was 1:15 in comparison to 10:52.”
Some students, however, used the delayed openings to sleep a little later, which may be beneficial for students. Studies show that delaying start times by just one hour increases reading and math test scores for middle school students. And lack of sleep can contribute to weight gain, anxiety, and depression, in addition to underperformance in school. For these reasons, the American Academy of Pediatrics called on school districts to push back start times. Recently, the Radnor School District moved their high school start time from 7:35 to 8:30.
However, one concern with pushing start times back is that students will simply stay up later. Kristin Jorgensen ‘22 comments, “I feel like since everyone knew beforehand that we would have an extra hour of sleep the next morning, I think there were a lot of people who stayed up later because they knew they were going to be able to sleep more in the morning. I know a bunch of people who got less sleep because of the opening.” Other students, however, like Shane Lawler ‘21 utilized the extra hour. He says, “I wouldn’t mind having the delayed opening more often. The extra sleep was really nice.”
Beaulieu believes that a change to the schedule would be possible. I think that if we were to have a later start every Wednesday or something, they would have to refine the schedule a bit. But I’m sure they would do that after taking feedback,” she says. When asked about this, Letts said, “I think we’d need to talk about making them a more regular occurrence. I’m not necessarily opposed to that, but we’d have to look at what we’d lose. Is it athletic time? Class time? How much are we willing to cut? You can’t take time from the schedule and keep everything the way it is. Something would have to give. We can certainly have that discussion, but I think many voices would have to weigh in if we wanted to explore that option.”