In Arundel Boardroom, Student Has True Clout

By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 3, 2006

Sitting on the dais of the Anne Arundel school board in her vaguely Gothic attire, Turkish evil eye earrings and beaded choker, Pallas Snider looks like some sort of Ivy League mystic.

But at the moment, she just may be the most influential person on the county's Board of Education.

Between French horn lessons and theater rehearsals, this 18-year-old senior from Severna Park High School is subtly shaping the public school bureaucracy that pays her teachers and prints her report cards. She will play a central role this month in deciding high school starting times, possibly the single most volatile issue that will come before the group in the early months of 2006.

"I'm not quite sure how to say it -- sometimes you forget that they're a student," said Tricia Johnson, one of seven adults on the school board.

Anne Arundel is the only county in the nation, education officials say, with a school board that extends full voting rights to a student. When relations deteriorated between the Anne Arundel board and then-Superintendent Eric J. Smith in a series of bitter, closed-door meetings last summer, Snider was there. Her support for the former superintendent and his projects has placed her on the short end of a five-to-three split on the school board, a stance that has not won her much good will from the five-person majority.

"She came into class the other day," recalled Anya Lamb, a friend and classmate at Severna Park High. "We were reading 'Hamlet' in English, and she was like, 'Wow, I just lived Hamlet.' "

Snider has cast the fifth and decisive vote more than once on the eight-member panel. In the fall, she single-handedly wrote a policy revision that would eliminate the valedictorian and salutatorian titles at graduation, replacing them with a broader cum laude designation. The document, written on her home computer one night in lieu of calculus homework, is being recast into more formal language by school-system administrators.

Snider first aspired to the school board at age 4, when she went door-to-door with her father as he campaigned for a seat on the school board in Burlington, Vt.

"I was his little prop to stand out on the street to wave and carry the signs," she recalled. Jim Snider served on the board there for three years. He won nomination to a seat on the Anne Arundel school board in 2002 by a convention of civic leaders, but then-Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D) awarded the seat to someone else.

Snider's mother also has had an active role in school affairs, chairing a parent group that successfully challenged the school system's decision to cut back electives in the sixth grade in 2001.

But since Pallas Snider won nomination to the Anne Arundel school board last summer, her parents say they have resisted the temptation to lobby her in private, and their public appearances at school board sessions have been fewer.

This month finds Snider at the center of another looming boardroom drama. She hopes to convince her colleagues that the school system should spend $4 million to open its 12 high schools almost an hour later, at 8 o'clock.

High schools start at 7:17 a.m. in Anne Arundel, the earliest opening bell in Maryland. Momentum has been building for several years to change that, a movement driven by parents along the Gov. Ritchie Highway corridor from Annapolis to Severna Park.

Those who favor the change cite sleep studies that show adolescents should sleep longer and later than adults. Ideally, teenagers should sleep well past dawn and start school at 9 o'clock or later.

But almost no one in Anne Arundel seems to support anything quite so radical. If high school started two hours later, it would end two hours later, which would mean less time for after-school sports, band practice and jobs.

Instead, attention has focused on an 8 o'clock start, a change that would afford students another 40 minutes of sleep without moving dismissal too far into the afternoon hours. The $4 million cost would buy the extra buses and drivers needed to carry the same number of students in less time; an earlier start allows each bus to make more trips.

"We spend 4.8 percent of our budget on transportation, and that's low," Snider said. "We have the earliest start time in the state. That says something."

Short of a scientific survey, there's no telling how many parents and students favor the change.

Sara Naeseth, a senior at Broadneck High School in Annapolis, considers 7:17 a.m. "a really random and ridiculous time. I have to wake up at 5:40 to get to school."

But Erin Kodis, a junior at Chesapeake High School in Pasadena, offered this contrary kernel of high-school wisdom: "A lot of people who sleep in school aren't going to not sleep in school just because you start school an hour later."

Snider has been collecting such opinions all year, in conversation and through an Internet site she created last summer for the purpose of initiating student debate on issues of the day. A discussion thread on school start times at http://www.aacstudents.org had 51 postings as of Friday, most in favor of the change, and had been viewed 711 times.

Among school board members, Snider's lead ally in advocating for later school hours is Paul Rudolph, a retired engineer four times her age. "I put two girls through school," Rudolph said, "and I know how hard it was getting them out the door in the morning."

Likely opponents, when the item comes to the board for discussion on Jan. 18, include Johnson, a parent from Davidsonville who says she would be hard-pressed to spend $4 million on school start times when there are teacher salaries and benefits to be paid.

"If it comes down to that choice," she said, "it's a pretty simple one for me."

Snider's job over the next two weeks -- amid college decisions and AP homework -- is to build her case.

"I wish I could go into a class and take pictures," she said. "First period, half the class is asleep. I think that if other board members could just be there and see it, they would change their minds."