The school day at Hempfield Area High School will get a little longer next fall. But it also should offer students more time for electives, career training and catching up in areas where they may struggle, district officials said.
The new schedule will eliminate homeroom and class periods split by lunch, move the popular “activity time” to later in the morning and start instruction earlier.
The end result, said Assistant Superintendant for Secondary Education Mark Gross, will give students enough time to take an additional class each day while getting a longer lunch period and preserving the mandatory study period/time for clubs and activities to meet.
“The school already has a great selection of electives and has a solid core of instruction,” Gross said. “We just wanted to tweak our bell schedule.”
Instead of having homeroom, activity period, then seven periods of instruction with the fourth or fifth split into two segments by a 26-minute lunch period, the high school will have 10 periods of about 40 minutes each (the first will be 44 minutes for attendance and announcements). The third period will be the equivalent of “activity time” for all students, when they can participate in clubs or get tutoring, and each student will get a lunch period somewhere in the fifth through eighth period of the day.
The school day will begin 10 minutes earlier, at 7:25 a.m., and end slightly later, at 2:45 p.m. Eliminating homeroom and moving the activity period to later in the morning means that classroom instruction will start an hour earlier than before, but Gross said that shouldn't affect students' readiness to learn.
While some districts have explored starting classes later , citing studies that teenagers perform better academically with more sleep, Gross said there were other studies contradicting them or suggesting that later start times don't correspond to students getting more rest. More employers expect work hours outside a normal 9-to-5, he said.
Moving to a later high school start time also would disrupt the transportation schedule for the district's other schools, he said.
The district will leave its graduation requirements the same, so giving students a slot for an extra class each day should make it easier for students to take elective classes or fulfill their graduation requirements sooner, Gross said.
Starting in the 2018-19 school year, seniors who have fulfilled most of their graduation requirements can apply to leave the high school earlier in the day to take college courses or do career-related activities including internships, career training or just working an after-school job.
“No longer are we going to require students to take things just to keep them in the building,” Gross said.
“Hempfield Area High School was very diligent looking at their schedule and giving students more flexibility for experiential learning outside school,” said Jane Heiple, director of the Westmoreland County Forum for Workforce Development and a member of the committee that helped develop the new schedule. “All students need to experience some kind of career exploration to be ready for their future.”
Matthew Santoni is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at 724 836 6660, msantoni@tribweb.com or on Twitter @msantoni.
