Photo by: Derek Redd
Kim Miller, superintendent of Ohio County Schools, said that even if a new committee were to come up with proposals to later open Wheeling Park High School, the problems preventing that possibility would remain.
WHEELING — The Ohio County Board of Education will again consider the possibility of changing school hours at Wheeling Park High School. This time, a committee will propose plans for the board to review and present to the public.
The board voted 5-0 to adopt a resolution for the committee, which includes board members Molly Aderholt and Andy Garber, Ohio County Superintendent Kim Miller, a WPHS teacher, a bus driver and two medical professionals.
“We’ve obviously been talking about this for a long time,” said Aderholt, who introduced the resolution. “I think 2019 was the first conversation we had as a board.”
“(The resolution states) we intend to pursue this further to see if we can make it happen, and then the committee will be tasked with looking at whether we can make it happen,” she added.
“This is not a vote that is definitively in favor of a change. Basically, it means we have a resolution to try to look at all the things we could potentially do.”
The resolution echoed many of the arguments made by those who called for a later start time at WPHS. For example, teenagers’ circadian rhythms lead to sleep patterns that keep them awake longer and alert later. When students arrive between 6:40 and 7:00 a.m., their bodies are still craving sleep. Adequate sleep also leads to better performance in school.
The committee will consider plans that would move the start of school to 8 a.m. at the earliest, and preferably 8:30 a.m. or later. The group will propose a few options, Aderholt said, and present them to the full board for review and possible vote.
Chief Executive David Croft said concrete proposals were needed to make a final decision on whether a change to the start times was feasible.
“The goal for you, at least in my eyes, is to come up with the best plan you can and present it to the community and see what works and what doesn’t,” he said. “Talk to the service staff and see what works and what doesn’t. Talk to the teachers and the administration. Because in the end, we just want a fully informed board to make a decision about whether this makes sense or not.”
“There are a lot of moving parts, but we never had a plan to discuss,” he continued. “So if you had a plan, you could say, ‘Tell me what’s good about it and what’s bad about it.’ But if we don’t have a plan, it’s, ‘Well, this is why it’s not going to work.'”
There was considerable debate before the resolution was passed. Garber questioned a paragraph in the resolution that said the board’s goal was to achieve a later start time. He said it would be better to say the board’s goal was to explore the possibility of later start times. That paragraph was ultimately removed from the resolution.
The original draft resolution also set a Nov. 1 deadline for Miller to identify and list practices in school districts that start high school classes after 8 a.m., including how those districts plan the length of school days at each level, how they organize student transportation and extracurricular activities, and how they prepare parents, teachers and students for the change.
This date has been moved to December 1 to give Miller and her staff more time to compile this information.
Miller, who said Monday night she was unaware of a solution, also had questions, some of them related to the research Edulog had already conducted on the changed start times. The company’s preliminary research showed the district would need 56 buses to accommodate a change in start times. At the time of that research, Ohio County Schools operated 31 buses.
“So are we ignoring all the time and money we got from Edulog?” she asked. “Because we spent a lot of time and money reviewing all our routes… and Edulog came back and said the only way to achieve this goal was to buy additional buses. So we’ve done a lot of that groundwork.”
“The board knows my opinion on this,” she added. “It’s not that we don’t agree with the science. It’s about all the input we’ve received from parents and from buying buses. I don’t know what’s going to change that.”
Croft said a number of proposals were needed to move the discussion forward.
“(The resolution) at least sets a roadmap for what we want to accomplish,” he said. “We don’t know how many buses it’s going to be until we decide on a plan. We don’t know how many riders it’s going to be until we decide on a plan. We don’t know the cost until we decide on a plan. So if you don’t decide on a plan, it’s easy to dismantle because it’s just fog. You don’t know what it is.”
The resolution was adopted with the caveat that, after Miller had read it thoroughly and objected to it, it could be brought up for discussion again at a later meeting.
