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February 5, 2024

Dear HCPS Community:

Our School Board is considering changing school start and end times for the 2024-25 school year. A task force was assembled to explore developmentally appropriate start times for our students and the barriers that affect our school start and end times. We would like to provide a summary of their findings and then invite input from our families, students, staff, and community partners.

As you may remember, 30 minutes were removed from the school day during the COVID pandemic to provide additional time for teacher planning. The task force recommends returning those 30 minutes to the instructional day for middle and high school and proposes the following start/end times for the 2024-25 school year:

Recommended Elementary School Hours: 7:45 am - 2:00 pm
Recommended Middle School Hours: 9:05 am - 4:00 pm
Recommended High School Hours: 8:25 am - 3:20 pm

What are the benefits?
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Institutes of Health, and the American Psychological Association all recognize that sleep is linked to the health, safety, and academic success of adolescents. They recommend that middle and high school students start school at 8:30 am or later. Benefits of a later start time for older students include increased attendance rates and a decrease in disciplinary action.  Current research suggests that earlier start times have very little effect on elementary students. 

What are the barriers?
Ideally, middle and high school students would have the same start time.  However, the City’s transportation department currently does not have the capacity to transport middle and high school students simultaneously. Additional considerations are extracurricular activities at the secondary level and our partnership with Massanutten Technical Center, which must coordinate its start times with HCPS and Rockingham County Public Schools.

Multiple stakeholders participated in the task force. The role of the task force was to take into account the research and create the best possible recommendations for HCPS students, given the constraints of our resources.

The School Board recognizes that these changes would impact our families and staff and they have created several opportunities to receive your feedback before they make a decision:

1. All stakeholders are encouraged to complete this survey.
2. The School Board will hold a public hearing on these proposed changes on Monday, February 12, 2024 at 7:00 pm at Skyline Middle School. Interpreters will be available.
3. You may email School Board members directly. Their email addresses are listed here. 

Thank you. 

Michael G. Richards, Ed.D.
Superintendent