Students board a Clark County School District school bus Friday morning. When the 2022-’23 school year begins many high school students in the district will be boarding their buses earlier; high schools throughout the district are seeing their start times moved earlier to better accommodate the district’s thinly stretched bus service.
Sunday, Feb. 13, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Life is busy for Green Valley High School student Brooklynn Martinez, who like many teenagers is balancing a schedule of school, work and social responsibilities.
A typical day could include working an after school job at a dog care facility, followed by staying up until the wee hours of the morning doing homework.
One thing is certain: Every minute is valuable for the high school junior. And those minutes will be even more crunched in the fall.
A planned districtwide shift next year in school start and end times in response to the stubborn bus driver shortage at Clark County School District has Martinez considering transferring to a charter school that won’t start so early.
“That’s how adamant she is about not wanting to start school at 7 o’clock,” said Julie Martinez, her mother.
At Green Valley, the full day will run from 7 a.m. to 1:11 p.m. It currently runs from 7:55 a.m. to 2:11 p.m.
When announcing the changes last month, the district said more than half of its roughly 340 campuses would see “slight” changes to their start and end times. Most schools will make an adjustment of less than half an hour, although 85 schools — mostly high schools — will see the first bell shift by between 30 and 60 minutes.
Generally, high schools will begin at 7 a.m., middle schools at 8 a.m. and elementary schools and 9 a.m. Under a tiered system, one bus driver can run routes for three schools and get all of the children to school on time, said CCSD transportation director Jennifer Vobis.
“This is not actually as dramatic of a solution” as cutting more routes or expanding the minimum distance a child has to live from school to get bus service, Vobis said. “I know it might be for some of the parents who haven’t had students in the district for a very long time, but a tiered schedule like this where there’s a standardized bell time, where schools start at similar bell times, is something that the Clark County School District used to have.”
Within the last year, CCSD has consolidated some routes and dropped several high school routes. Students on the routes that were dropped were instead supplied with passes for rides on public buses.
The district asked if Nevada Guard members could fill in as drivers, a tactic that has worked in other states, but was turned down. CCSD has also offered districtwide and transportation-specific retention and hiring bonuses to stem losses.
Vobis points to Washoe County School District’s recent decision to consolidate stops for thousands of students mid-year as the kind of cutting-to-the-bone move she doesn’t want to take. The Reno-area district is at a 68-driver deficit, worse than the 42-driver shortfall it faced in the fall.
CCSD would need 1,570 drivers to be fully staffed, but started the school year down 250 drivers. It’s currently down about 240. The shortage can be partially attributed to better and year-round pay in the private sector, and managing the pandemic — some drivers are sick;
others didn’t want to risk getting sick.
To parents upset by the biggest swings in school times, Vobis said district leaders made the decision together, and didn’t take it lightly. She said she also knows how upset parents are with bus arrival delays that have plagued CCSD all year, sometimes by as much as four hours.
“We didn’t want to disrupt our community,” she said. “We also want to do what’s in the best interest of students.”
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, however, would differ that a 7 a.m. start time for schools is in the best interest of students.
Both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommend that middle and high schools begin no earlier than 8:30 a.m. so that students get an adequate night’s sleep. Students who don’t get enough sleep, they say, are more likely to be overweight, suffer from symptoms of depression and perform poorly in school, among other health issues.
Acknowledging that 93% of high schools in the U.S. start classes before 8:30 a.m., the CDC says, “Good sleep hygiene in combination with later school times will enable adolescents to be healthier and better academic achievers.”
Julie Martinez wants her daughter to have a traditional senior year. Next year is prom, and Brooklynn could be a cheerleader again, like she is this year.
The girl lost much of her freshman and sophomore year experiences to the pandemic but took advantage of distance learning to take a few extra online classes so that next year, she only needs three classes to graduate — although she must start her day with first period.
Julie Martinez leaves for work at 5 a.m. She said she can’t be sure Brooklynn would get out of the house on time to meet a 7 a.m. first bell; Martinez knows teens typically aren’t early birds like her.
She argues that the School District should have had elementary schools start the earliest, citing teens’ natural sleep rhythms and their lifestyles, which can look like her daughter’s: more homework than young kids and other after-school obligations, like jobs.
“I just feel that they didn’t take the time to thoroughly look at how it’s going to affect teenagers starting so early, especially kids that have transportation issues,” she said.
Meredith Freeman’s twin daughters attend Clark High School for its magnet programs. That means the ninth-graders not only must be on campus for early bird classes that start at 7, but they have to be dropped off by one of their parents because they don’t live in Clark’s bus zone.
Next year’s magnet start won’t change.
Acknowledging that Clark’s start times aren’t changing, Freeman takes a pragmatic outlook.
“The district is doing what it has to do within the constraints,” she said. “They could do so many more drastic things, and I think this is a small first step to getting this under control with the limited resources they have.”
