Board Members Delay Vote on Staggered School Times

The question of whether to rotate starting and ending times for 137 of the 152 schools of the San Diego Unified School District was delayed for another week Tuesday after Board of Education members said they lacked sufficient information to make a decision.

A new issue surfaced at Tuesday’s meeting, with parents of junior high school students saying that, in schools in which their children share extracurricular activities with high school students, they are often unable to participate because of different starting and ending times.

To rectify that, the board will have to consolidate starting and ending times between the 12 junior high schools that enroll ninth-graders and the high schools where they participate in extracurricular activities. And, to do that, a school spokeswoman said the board will have to decide whether it wants seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders at the junior high schools in question sharing buses with high school students.

“We want to look at it, to make sure we’re not creating a problem,” said Norma J. Trost, information officer for San Diego City Schools. “Because we’ll have such a wide age group on one bus, we want to study it further. As it is, however, many ninth-graders--in junior high schools that carry a ninth grade--are simply precluded from participating in extracurricular activities.”

The new starting times were proposed to the board in March, as a way of making do with a limited number of school buses. The district has a plethora of special integration and special education programs that require bus transportation of students all over the city.

Trost said more than 80 of the 105 elementary schools in the district will be asked to submit to a rotation schedule, in which starting and ending times rotate every three years. She said the starting times will be either 7:30 a.m. or 9 a.m. Many schools now have starting times of 8, 8:30 or 8:45 a.m., Trost said.

Not all schools are subject to the rotation timetable. It applies only to those who have students being bused in from other parts of the city, she said.

The school heard from several speakers at Tuesday’s meeting, some who favored starting at 7:30, others at 9. Two women representing the Loma Portal Elementary School said a 7:30 a.m. start time would be disastrous for their students because of increased jet noise from Lindbergh Field during those hours. The board agreed to take the Loma Portal matter under advisement.