The first day back to school is just around the corner, and some students in Surrey are going to have to adjust to changes in terms of how classes are scheduled.
This year, some schools in the city — including Grandview Heights, Lord Tweedsmuir, and Fleetwood Park Secondary — will have extended days and staggered hours as a means of addressing overcapacity in the system.
This change will give students an extra period, which means some will start and end their days at different times.
Anne Whitmore, the past acting president of the Surrey District Parent Advisory Council, says the staggered schedules may help address the issue of overcrowding in the short term, but they don’t solve the problem.
“The benefit is that we aren’t sending students out-of-district because we don’t have the space,” she said.
“They’re being creative in making more space for classrooms and having kids in classes. But this isn’t a long-term solution.”
Whitmore says these changes aren’t going to do students any favours in terms of their development.
“You’re not creating the community and communal spaces, real rooms, counsellor rooms — all means that we talk about elevating mental health of students and creating great learning environments for them, and this doesn’t do that,” Whitmore said.
Having a mix of start times could also create issues in terms of parents’ schedules.
“So a parent might have a student at a daycare, an elementary school, a secondary school, they might have an older student at secondary be responsible for dropping off a younger student at elementary school, and so the logistics as a parent have just increased exponentially, and with the new semester, we might see shifts again,” she said.
“So it just really adds a lot of complexity to the managing of a family schedule.”
What really needs to happen, Whitmore says, is an injection of funding as well as a streamlining of the time it takes for schools to be built.
“So even after school is approved, I believe the development cycle can take up to five years before that school space will ever be open,” she said.
“So a student in eighth grade might never actually experience a new school stage.”
However, students may actually like some aspects of the concept, she says.
“We’ve been told that some of the senior students like to have a spare block in the middle of the day, because they can go to the library, or if it’s at the end of the day, then they can go to a job,” she said.
“We joke about trying to get teenagers out of bed… so having a later start might be beneficial to some, but overall, this isn’t going to be the same schedule for one student for the entire year. This is going to be life in flux.”
Staggered schedules could help students get adequate sleep
As students prepare to head back to school, some may be dreading getting back into a normal sleep schedule.
Dr. Wendy Hall, a retired professor at the UBC School of Nursing, says that while some families try to keep a sleep routine, others have let theirs go out the window due to trips, and returning can be a big adjustment.
It is possible for parents to make the adjustment a bit easier, she says.
“I usually recommend that they try and reinstate their bedtime routines and school-based bedtimes that were happening before summer vacation about a week before school starts,” she said.
“It’s a bit close now — it’s only a few days [away] — but the earlier the better, because it means you can gradually move the bedtimes a little bit earlier.
“And then it’s not such a big crunch when you come to the day before school starts.”