LPCSD Superintendent Timothy Seymour said the district’s official start time — or the time buses are due to arrive at school — is now 8:05 a.m. for all students in grades K-12. Instruction will start around 8:25 a.m.

The middle-high school will be transitioning away from a 7:20 a.m. start time under this change; the elementary school’s start time was already 8:05 a.m.

Seymour said that for families who need to drop off their students earlier than 8:05 a.m., the school will have an early drop-off option beginning at 7:25 a.m. each school morning. Students who are dropped off early will go to either the gym or the library until 8:05 a.m., when those students will be able to grab breakfast and head to class with the rest of their peers.

Seymour said that the combined bus runs will have a monitor on the bus along with the students and the bus driver. He said elementary school students will sit in the front of the bus and middle-high school students will sit in the back. The monitor will assist the driver to make sure the run goes smoothly and safely, according to Seymour, and to make sure parents have an extra level of security that the buses are a safe and happy place for students.

There will be slightly different dismissal times at the elementary and middle-high school to give bus drivers time to first pick up middle-high schoolers at 2:50 p.m. before picking up elementary school students at 3 p.m. Seymour said that students who walk or bike to school will be dismissed at 2:50 p.m.

Sept. 2 is the first day of the 2022-23 school year.

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Reasons and benefits

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There were a few motivating factors behind unifying start times, according to Seymour, and he said the change will have multiple benefits.

The district’s population has dropped by almost half in the last couple of decades, Seymour said — from around 1,000 students 20 years ago to around 560 this past school year. Seymour’s office is near the middle-high school bus dropoff, and he said he’d look out his window in the mornings over the past year and often see only a handful of kids getting off the buses. He noticed the same thing at the elementary school, where he said he does a lot of bus greeting.

Seymour thought that many districts in the region are looking at unifying their start times as schools come out of the “hard years” of the pandemic. Niki Coursen — who’s served as the district’s head of transportation for just over a year and as a district bus driver for around 18 years — said that ridership on district school buses has dwindled since the pandemic started. When in-person classes resumed in the district in 2021, she said the district asked families to keep their kids off the bus if possible. This past year, she noticed that a lot of families never went back to putting their kids on the bus. Some buses only had five or six kids riding at once, she said, and she sees the unified start time as a cost savings to the district.

The combined bus runs also allows bus drivers to be more geographically strategic in how they are picking up students. With the new start time, Coursen said, the district will be able to eliminate at least one morning bus run to Wilmington. And for families that have students in elementary and middle-high school grades, siblings that used to be picked up 30 minutes apart will be able to catch the bus together. Coursen thinks that will help give a sense of comfort to parents, too.

“It will help the whole family dynamic,” she said.

While the district knew that low capacity on the buses would be a practical reason to unify start times, Seymour said the district wanted to make sure that kind of change would be a direct benefit to district students, parents and staff, too. He said research showed it would be.

Seymour thought more districts in the region are starting to consider students’ mental health more, given research that shows it’s not “developmentally conducive” for kids — especially at the middle-high school level — to be in the classroom that early. That’s part of the reason why he said the district wanted to unify start times.

“We want to hit the ground running with the kids when they’re at their strongest,” he said.

Research shows that a later start time — around 8:30 a.m. — is better for adolescent sleep cycles, brain development and learning, according to Seymour. An 8:05 a.m. arrival time will allow instruction to start right around 8:25 a.m., Seymour said. Seymour added that he’s heard a positive response from the middle and high schoolers who have heard about the later start time.

The middle-high school has always started school 45 minutes earlier than the elementary school. This past year, the first middle-high school student to be picked up in Wilmington had to catch the bus at around 6:20 a.m., according to Coursen. Next year, that same student will be able to get on the bus closer to 7 a.m.

“We feel like it was a cost savings, it was beneficial for students’ sleep and it was beneficial for student instruction,” Seymour said.

The change will also allow the district to better synchronize meetings between K-12 staff and department leaders, since they’ll be released from school at the same time, and juniors and seniors attending the BOCES program at the Adirondack Educational Center will have a more aligned instruction period there with their peers from the Tupper Lake, Saranac Lake and Long Lake Central school districts. Seymour said that LPCSD high schoolers were arriving at the center earlier and leaving later than the other students, which caused them to lose valuable minutes of instruction time — sometimes up to 35 minutes a day, he said, as they waited on their peers to arrive and left earlier. That time adds up over the course of a year, he said, and the later start time will give those hours back.

The change will also give the district more time to make calls about school closures due to winter weather conditions.

“Now we’re going to know if it’s just a stiff breeze in the North Country or if a hard rain’s going to fall,” Seymour said, “just because we built in that extra 45 minutes across the board. There are so many ways I think this is going to be beneficial.”