Oswego SD308 elementary, junior high students to see shorter school day this fall

Oswego SD308 elementary and junior high students will see a slightly shorter school day starting this fall.

By a vote of 6-1, the Oswego school board at its July 10 meeting approved a plan to shorten the school day for elementary and junior high students by five minutes. Voting “no” was board member Jennifer Johnson.

The change is part of a proposal by the School Day Committee. Faith Dahlquist, the district’s associate superintendent for educational services who is a member of the committee, spoke to school board members last month about the plan.

The proposal would decrease all passing periods for junior high students by one minute and lengthen student support time by three minutes.

“Our administrators are really excited about that,” Dahlquist said, in talking about the additional support time the students would receive.

The new school day would be from 8:10 a.m. to 3:05 p.m.

In addition, elementary school students would see their days shortened by five minutes. The new school day would be from 9 a.m. to 3:45 p.m.

“But I want to point out to everyone that the teacher day would not be changing at all,” Dahlquist said. “In our elementary schools right now, there is no one to supervise our students right away. Students come in, but you can imagine that in kindergarten in November, when they come in with their snowsuits and their mittens, it takes a while to get instruction going. So by having our teachers available earlier than that, we’ll actually be letting in students and be able to start instruction a few minutes earlier.”

The committee plans to continue its work to come up with other possible changes to the student schedule.

“For quite some time, there has been interest in trying to find a way to have our elementary school day end earlier, especially in the winter months,” Dahlquist said. “Our students go home in the dark. Our teachers report that the end of the day is very tiring for a lot of our students.”

The committee also plans to continue to address the problem of long junior high lunch periods. They are currently 41 minutes along.

“Those of you who have ever supervised a junior high lunchroom know that a lot of additional down time is sometimes not a great thing, so that is something we tried to look at,” Dahlquist said.

According to the committee’s report, the unstructured time “often causes more student conflict and misbehavior.” During the July 10, board member Jared Ploger asked how the district plans to address the problem.

“I’ve already started to work with our associate superintendent as well as with our human resources team,” new Oswego School Superintendent Andalib Khelghati said in response. “We are beginning to think about out-of-box solutions.”

He said the district is looking at possibly creating activities “to support our students during that period so it becomes a more enriching experience for them.”

The committee also looked at how a later start time might affect high school students.

“I wish I could tell you that we were super successful,” Dahlquist said. “But it was a very difficult job. For those of you who don’t know, most of our buses run three routes. They do a high school route, and junior high and elementary. And because we use the same bus drivers to do that, you have to have enough time to drop off students, go back out into the community, pick up kids and come back to the next level.”