Study halls don’t count towards time on learning.

I don't even care if my kids want to be factory workers. If they find personal fulfillment in that, awesome. It's really not about income or the need to be your own person...those things are obviously important but not my guiding light... personal fulfillment, taking owbershio of their lives...yes factory workers typically don't exude that...but I want to be clear that I don't belittle anyone who works to provide a service.

I'm with you finding passions and developing skills that will matter in their future, knowing the basics of coding, developing strong communication skills, thinking globally beyond their little bubbles, regardless of where that bubble may be. We're leaving for Portugal in a couple of months while they continue with their online curriculum, while we supplement with weekly field trips, Portuguese language development (which will be in a classroom because they see enough of my mug) and travels across the country.

I'm gunna be honest, I wouldn't have fucking noticed.

You haven't allowed for daylight saving.

Portland is under 4 hour’s drive from Northampton.

This warms my cold black heart.

If I'm at a drive through Dunkies in Meffa, I don't want to deal with this crap. I want my fuckin hot medium regula'.

I started high school at 7:10. High school for northborough and Southborough

I started high school at 7:10. High school for northborough and Southborough

The Downeaster line isn't too great for day trips to Portland, you're almost better off just driving. But everything in New England is closer than it seems, (depending on traffic). You might not have Portland, but Northampton has great access to a lot of the scenic little towns in southern Vermont and easy access to the white and green mountains.

So the article suggests 830. Are these kids just going to be going to sports before school, of course some already do like hockey due to ice time. But doesn't that make this entire thing a wash for a large portion of kids?

I was in line with the current MA start time I was not getting out of regular sports between 630-800pm pending the sport, meet, season we are talking about. So now that's all gonna be like an hour later?

We would have like an hour break after school before practice unless you were weightlifting that day so basically not enough time to do any work or decompress.

Try checking out some posts on r/PetiteFashionAdvice. I'm sure if you browse some posts there you'll get something helpful.

If you don't like suits, I'd suggest dresses- which can easily be hemmed by a tailer depending on your height. Nordstrom rack has a bunch on sale right now. A simple sheath dress with an evening jacket would probably fit what you need.

I wish someone had yelled “Affleck you da bomb in Phantoms yo!”

Don’t deliver coffee during morning rush hour and surprise people with delays. Delightful interaction that causes delays can exist, but not in the morning if your boss might figure you because you’re late.

Exactly.

I’m not raising factory workers. I want my kids to learn how they learn best, to find their passions through learning and be allowed to be themselves— not be placed in a box and be told who they are by their peers.

My kids' school district (Newton) shifted the High School start time to 9:00 from 7:40 this year, a huge change. There do seem to be some benefits to starting later, but there are clear trade-offs.

It really messes with after-school activities, particularly sports because you have to coordinate with other schools. Our HS end time is now 3:45, so by the time kids can get on a bus to travel to an away game it's 4:00pm. By the time you arrive at another high school, game time may have to be 5:00pm. Now you have to worry about commuter traffic, sunset times, and pushing dinnertime to be quite late. Not to mention students at the other school have been out since 2:30pm or whatever and have to wait around for the Newton team to arrive a couple of hours later.

Sure, the sports team can leave school early. But if one outcome of a later start time is having athletes miss school, then that's not great.

Another issue: during the winter, it's starting to get dark while kids are going home from school. That's a safety issue, and it also just sucks to have zero daylight after school.

Or sports, not really scouts, but the others will just all he before school this making the entire thing a wash.

Why is this downvoted. I have met very few people who would want to start later. It wouldn't change much anyways. Sports would just be before school so all those kids would still be getting up at the same time.

I am the same way, long out of school but I would much rather start early and be done early and have the entire afternoon to myself.

Happy to hear... apparently I'm fucking my kids up to a good portion of this thread.

If I didn't have eyes and ears to see what is actually going on around me my entire life I'd probably be more worried...

The number of miserable, unfulfilled people I know personally and on the interwebs are a pretty clear indicator to me that the one thing most people went thru isn't doing it's intended job. Or maybe it is.

Summer school isn't required. You can't get fired for not working summer school. A district could be unreasonable and not renew a teacher without tenure/professional status for not doing it, but right now, they're in no such position.

PD isn't required. Prepping isn't required. And when the first day of school hits, teachers are judged on their ability to teach. Protesting in the summer to an audience of no one and calling bad lessons later on the summer's protest makes no sense.

>I quite literally proposed an alternative way to bring about contract agreement.

So did I. Tell districts to be proactive. If not, teachers can be "retroactive" and protest after a long period without changes. Seems to work. Make it so this kind of protest can't work and you'll be in good shape. No one wants to have to protest, but we don't live in that kind of world.

Literally every other state but LA has a later start time and they all have sports.

I work to my contract. If you don't like the contract, get a new contract during negotiations - the same way any other company would have to deal with it.

I'm begging you to stop making a fool out of yourself, though. No teacher is so vindictive. You want quality educators? Pay them. Simple as that. Far better to strike for a lousy one week than watch a slow leak of qualified veterans turn to other fields. Even lower-paying fields that are just easier to process and handle healthily.

Dude...short temper? I did the job for 15 years... I had my kids in school for over a decade... I think a final straw was more like it.

I'm happy with our decision, and was very skeptical at first...my kids feel less stressed and I'm impressed with their progress and their ability to determine what they want to learn, they even have time to learn a foreign language, something they wouldn't get until high school, for 2 years....

Listening to my 3rd grader learn about consumers and producers for 2 months during Covid was more than enough to see where the focus is. We definitely have our ups and downs but overall my wife and I think it's the best choice for our family at the moment. We're not even opposed to them returning to public school, but not while standardized testing rules and the lack of individualized learning and teaching the individual are not taken seriously.

I understand the constraints, but the technology capabilities and resources are readily available, but as long as the system for educators values the ease of collecting data over how school actually should work for the individual we're good. Unless they really feel like they are missing out. For now the social activities they have (they spend a solid chunk of time in sports with other kids) seem like they are providing them with that aspect...their friends that are in school don't really sell it very well either.

Edit: I don't go on Facebook nor am I part of any homeschooling groups on Facebook or anywhere else. I'm just a frustrated educator that watched apathy play out every single day. I tried hard to make kids care about learning to make their day interesting and I guess ultimately failing...the vast majority simply don't, the overwhelming majority of the parents whose kids I taught didn't care about their kids education.

I have high expectations, I didn't graduate from high school in the states and struggled...but the fact that I wasn't just passed along was important to me. And I was allowed to try new things, lots of freedom to make academic risks. In my experience, and maybe I worked in a shitty school (on paper it's not, very much the contrary) we are very much pushed to pass students, look the other way, "seeing what we can do for kids"...that is not indicative of a solid school system. And it's not just my personal experience ..I have multiple friends in administrative positions...it's a problem.

It’s buses. Unlike most other states, in Massachusetts the individual school districts bear the full cost of school buses (and manage their own vendor contracts), so districts stagger the school start times so the same buses can do multiple pickups and drop offs.

Look at the very big difference we have between high school and elementary school start times. At least some districts that tried to change start times in the last few years have run into huge problems with buses. As is often the case with buses in Massachusetts, it’s not even how fast the bus can complete the route, it’s how fast it can get back to the start of the route to do it again.

When I grew up in New Jersey, my school bus to middle and high school was a regular public bus with a school voucher that ran its route all day. It started in New York City and ended 100 miles away. My town didn’t pay for the same bus to come to my street to pick me up then come by again to pick up my younger siblings.

But Massachusetts has a lot of densely populated areas with no state bus service and the major road routes that aren’t highways are old and chaotic. The bus drives out from the depot to the school district and runs its routes within the district.

That’s 2:50-3pm in MA, that’s way too late

As with how far north we are we have still earlier sunrises from March to September and earlier sunsets from September to March.