Fredericton, Oromocto schools doing away with half-days, changing staggered start times

More changes are coming to student schedules in the capital region in the fall, but this time they may be more welcome to parents.

A letter on Friday from David McTimoney, superintendent of  Anglophone West School District, said that Fredericton elementary students will no longer have half-day Wednesdays, and those in Oromocto will no longer have half-day Fridays, beginning in September. 

Changes across the province to even out the number classroom hours for students proved especially difficult in Fredericton and Oromocto where they tried to keep the half days, the letter from McTimoney said. 

These adjustments represent a return to a more normal schedule after many parents complained about staggered arrival and dismissal times this year, especially a problem for parents with children spread across different grades who faced different schedules. 

In November, following many complaints, the district hired a consultant to gather feedback from families about the changes, and more than 4,000 survey responses were gathered.

"After examining all of those scenarios, we knew that we needed to make a change to the way it is this year," said McTimoney in an interview. 

He added that the district had worked hard to find "the sweet spot" when it comes to balancing classroom hours and a complex busing system that serves more than 18,000 students and travels more than 34,000 kilometres a day. 

All schools in the district will now start between 8:00 a.m. and 8:35 a.m., and dismiss between 2:05 p.m. and 3:35 p.m. This also addresses a recent update to the district's contract with teachers that calls for daily instructional minutes, which was thrown off by having half-days, the letter said.

"It allows for some consistency across most of Anglophone West, it allows for some consistency right across the province as well," McTimoney said. 

In the coming months, the district will meet with schools to nail down more precise bus times for the coming year, he said. 

"We believe that those times will be reasonable and we're trying to minimize the amount of time that it would take and for students to be waiting after school."

Parent thankful for changes

The move is already comforting parents who had found the staggered and later start times a challenge.

Lily Smallwood, who has five children in elementary, middle and high schools in Fredericton, said it was nice to see the district listening to feedback from parents.

"I found that encouraging," she said. 

"It felt like the changes last year had come out of nowhere and we were all blindsided by it and they hadn't thought through how it would affect families."

The change next year will have positive impacts for the family, which currently sees the kids take the bus at very different times. Her elementary-age child takes the bus around 7:35 a.m., but the middle schoolers aren't be picked up until an hour later. 

In the afternoon, her youngest arrives home by 2:45 but her oldest isn't back until past 6:00.

"We're going to get suppertime back. That's a big thing for us," Smallwood said, because her oldest son, who is in high school, often gets home much later than his siblings.

"We very often just have to save him a plate. And so we've lost that really sacred family time around the table and we're going to be able to get that back."

It will also make a difference for her middle school children, whose school starts are much later this year. 

"They get up in the morning to get ready for school and they're just kind of waiting around the house, you know, wanting to watch TV, wanting to hang out on their phones," she said. 

"And so it makes more sense to get them back at that early morning hours that they've been used to their whole lives."

The whole experience was a "learning experience for the district," Smallwood said, adding that she feels relieved for her family. 

"I'm really impressed with the fact that they took the effort to listen for feedback, especially from teachers," she said. 

"Let's do our homework first. Let's talk to families first and see how it's going to affect them before we make huge changes that affect people's lives."