By Annie Gowen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 20, 2008

A community transportation task force has recommended that the Fairfax County School Board consider reshuffling its school opening-bell times to give high school students more time to sleep in the mornings.

The 68-member task force appointed by the School Board spent eight months studying the complicated opening-bell schedules and school bus routes for county students before coming up with its recommendations, which it presented to the board last week. The group suggested pushing back the bell time for high school students from 7:20 a.m. to between 8:35 and 8:55 a.m. The earliest start time for elementary schools would stay the same, 7:50 a.m.

When they gave their marching orders to the task force in the summer, School Board members said that later bell times would be beneficial for students but added that the cost of such an endeavor would be a key constraint. Adding buses or drivers to the fleet would be a monumental task in a difficult budget year, board members said.

"The board is supportive of the issue that later start times would help students improve their performance, but the difficulty has been for many, many years the potential costs of making these changes," said School Board Chairman Daniel G. Storck (Mount Vernon).

Cost estimates over the years have ranged from "practically nothing" to about $40 million, Storck said.

A study released in late 2006 said that the county's bus system was "pushed to the breaking point" and needed to be restructured. Each day, about 1,570 buses shuttle about 110,000 county students to and from school. Increasing traffic, congestion and a lack of qualified bus drivers have strained the bus system.

Dick Reed, the task force's chairman, told the board that the latest proposal for shifting the bell times would be "cost neutral."

However, Dean Tistadt, chief operating officer for the school system's facilities and transportation services division, said he "strongly disagreed" with that. School transportation officials will examine the plan in the coming months to come up with a cost estimate; the board could vote on the plan as early as the fall.

Community advocates such as the parent group SLEEP (Start Later for Excellence in Education Proposal) have long argued that such early bell times for high-schoolers -- which mean some families rise well before 6 a.m. -- are at odds with teenagers' natural body clock and that resulting fatigue is bad for academic performance.

A group from the transportation committee argued that getting students on a healthy sleep schedule is a family's responsibility. The group questioned the move's economic feasibility and suggested that shifting the bell schedule could have a negative effect on after-school activities.