There has been a citizen driven movement in our community, somewhat started by Dr John Hanrahan and vocalized by Sally Elliot to at least have a discussion about starting school later. This morning, I heard that “0 hour” at the high school began at 6:15 AM. YES, school starts at SIX FIFTEEN AM (for some kids).  That appears to be the time slot where many of our advanced courses like AP Physics lab are offered.  There’s nothing quite like waking up to a discussion of advanced physics!

That said, the school district seems open to discussing the option of starting high school later.

If you missed last night’s school district presentation on later start times for our high schoolers, as we did, you may be interested in reading the powerpoint and/or watching a video of the event.

Click here for the presentation.. The video is below.

Each week, Park City School District’s Office Hours with Ember Conley attracts more citizens. This morning 15 1/2 people attended the meeting. That 1/2 was a baby (get them started young!).

Today’s discussion stretched from later start times, to the status of teacher surveys, to the learning center, to the plan for both a 5/6 and 7/8 school, to growth, to some miscellaneous items. Below was my best effort at capturing major ideas expressed at the meeting.

• The first topic was later start times for our classes…
  • Late start meeting last night was great.
  • Citizen said she has had kids and always dreaded early start.She says “we have a community that is so well educated and we have so many AP classes and are trying to compete and kids are taking heavy loads and classes like Physics lab is at 0 hour. The bus picks them up at 6:47 AM.” One of her kids will have zero hour runs track, and does debate. She realizes there is time that has to be made up but she feels our kids need more rest.
  • Citizen asks what zero hour is. Dr COnley replied it’s an optional hour of class before school. It starts at 6:15AM.
  • Citizen asks why classes have to be picked in March. The answer was that scheduling is complex with regard to when classes can be offered, what teacher needs are, etc.
  • Citizen says he understands that part of the scheduling problem is the buses.
  • Citizen says it is hard to work with late start times with younger children.
  • Dr Conley says if swapped times, Ecker Hill would be the earliest start time and that would be only two years.
  • Citizens asks when the elementary school would start. Response was that everything is still be considered but the current proposed scenario is at 8:15.
  • Two bell system (two start times for district) would cost extra $1 million in capital for buses.
  • Three bell system (three different start times) would have high school starting at 9AM. They would finish at 4PM.
  • Dr Conley says if that some administrators are concerned that if we are buying buses before we put money into facilities, something is wrong.
  • Citizen says 88 minute class periods seem too long. Dr Conley says 7 period day is more efficient than block period but that we’ve had great success with the block schedule (block schedule means certain classes on one day and othe classes on alternating days)
  • Dr Conley says she would personally prefer shorter days with more school days but that can cost a lot of money and has other drawbacks.
  • Citizen says she got a call before the meeting last night. She referenced a teacher who says he has kids who fall asleep first period. He says that’s not the case with later classes. She says many teachers have expressed this.
  • Dr Conley says one of the ripple effects with moving some schools to an earlier start time (and high school later) is after school programs. She says if classes start earlier, then young kids will be at after school programs for longer periods, so after school programs may have to cost citizens more.
• A citizen asks if results of the teacher survey about the district been released?
  • Citizen says she has heard that teachers are afraid of speaking out. She feels they need to be able to speak out.
  • Dr Conley says she wants to hear what teachers think. She meets with teacher and the union regularly.
  • Phil Kaplan (of the school board) is facilitating this process. Dr Conley says there were so many comments that need to be coded to responses. Statisticians have been brought in to look at it. It should be released by April or May.
  • Citizen says there seems to be a culture of where teachers are afraid.
• Citizen asks what the status of the learning center is. He says there are rumors flying about it being closed.
  • Dr Conley says they are actually adding positions at learning center.
  • Citizens asks if there are exit studies about how the kids are doing after leaving the learning center. Dr Conley says she will check into it but it is a hard problem to track.
  • Citizen says that perhaps the problem is that the district is talking about bringing the learning center into high school and people are getting confused.
  • Dr Conley says that there are more and more problems with TMJH. So, they are continuing to look at bringing the 9th grade into the high school. As part of that, it may make sense to bring the learning center into the high school as well because more technical classes could be offered to both learning center kids and other kids at the school.
• Citizen asks why there is continuing talk about having two schools at intermediate level (5/6 and 7/8). He says trend is that K-8 now. He says you don’t find the 5/6 and 7/8 many places. He asks why are we trying to do that?
  • Citizen responded to the question and said having 9th grade at the high school makes sense. Many 9th graders need access to 10th grade classes. So, he believes a 9th grade close to the high school. He says then it becomes a building issue.
  • Another citizen says we should be looking at what is right for the kids before discussing building and traffic.
  • Citizen says most people are fine with the 9th grade being in the high school.
  • Dr Conley says she asked her elementary teachers about what grades should be together. She said some said it should be K-6. However, most said they should have 5th and 6th together. Many of the teachers felt that 6th graders should not be with 7th graders because of the different maturity levels. Teachers also felt that 5th and 6th should be out of the current schools with the addition of Pre-K.
• Citizen asks what will happen with growth.
  • Dr Conley says an example is Trailside. She says we need three more teachers for additional classes but there are not enough classrooms.
  • Dr Conley says the biggest growth right now is 8th, 9th, and 10th graders.
  • Dr Conley says she has been talking with North Summit and South Summit. She says she has told them that until they give us money for schools, we will not open our classrooms. She said that did not go over well with them but she was saying what was right for our district.
  • Citizen says she has shifted her thinking because she thinks there will be many additional Kindergartners and Pre K full day, she thinks the district will be out of room in the elementary school. She suggests that an early learning center be added. She says that there could be 300-400 PreK and Kindergarten kids in this type of building and it could be built for 3 to 4 year olds. Dr Conley says those are the types of things that we are open to. Dr Conley says she HAS to do something with TMJH. She said she then has to get the 9th graders into the high school. She says the rest of it, she is open to discussing.
• Citizen asks if Dr Conley is at liberty to share what bad things she just learned about TMJH. Dr Conley said no.
• Citizen says one of the other things to think about there are opportunities when older kids mix with younger kids. She went to a K-8 and said the opportunities the younger kids had because of the older kids were huge. She said the little kids were separated from older kids in the building a bit but it worked.
• Look at hiring dance teacher full time at Parley’s Park. She has been teaching part time reading through dance.
• Dr Conley wants to add 10-14 additional teachers (1.5 to TMJH. 3 sections Kindergarten. Rest are elementary). Right now our lowest class size is 11. The largest average is 23.3.

Note: I also recorded today’s Office Hour’s meeting. If you are bored on a Friday night, and interested you may want to give it a listen. This meeting is at a loud coffee shop, so you may hear some strange noises from time to time. Click play below to begin listening.

As many people remember, in January an Ecker Hill teacher was charged with felony counts for “alleged inappropriate communications with a student that spanned approximately four months.” According to the Park Record, “The allegations against [the teacher] first came to light earlier this month when the accuser, a student at Ecker Hill, showed a school counselor a series of sexually explicit emails [the teacher] had allegedly sent him.” At the time there was a justified outcry from the community over how something like this could happen and go unnoticed for so long. In the next few days a new system will come online to help prevent something like what allegedly happened from happening again at Park City schools.

The school district has subscribed to a service called Gaggle. While the name doesn’t sound serious, their business is. Gaggle provides a monitoring solution that scans email, attachments, calendars, and documents looking for pornography, inappropriate images, and certain words. According to the School District’s press release, “Once an item is flagged, Gaggle Student Safety Representatives review content and apply district-approved intervention procedures.” Perhaps most importantly, this solutions watches over both students and staff for signs of mis conduct.

According to Associate Superintendent of Human Resources, Dr. Tim McConnell, “Contracting with Gaggle Safety Management will expand the district’s current capabilities to monitor and filter content. Gaggle will not only alert us to inappropriate content, it will also allow us to be stay on top of issues like bullying, threats of violence and self-harm. I want to give credit to our Technology Director, Joe Stout, for finding this service and working out the details to have it implemented.“

It’s also important to note that Gaggle appears to be good at what they do. They have been in the K-12 education market for 17 years. They are a 14 time award finalist for the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) CODiE award. They also have a very well defined student/staff privacy policy.

In addition to looking at new email coming in, we wanted to understand if Gaggle will be used to look at older emails to find cases where inappropriate conduct may have taken place in the past. Dr McConnell responded that “Gaggle won’t go retroactively, but we do have an email archiver. As a part of stepping up our efforts, we did look for inappropriate content based on sexually oriented verbiage – which would have included attachments. Every email in and out has been archived for approximately 8 years – over 33 million emails – and they will continue to be archived.”

We at the Park Rag are glad that personnel within the school district have already thought of how to handle historical email and have taken steps to understand whether any issues took place. It demonstrates that the school district took the matter very seriously. It will be interesting to see if any additional charges are pressed.

While no software product can guarantee that our children will not become victims of sexual predators, systems like Gaggle can both prevent predators from taking action due to the likelihood they will be caught and catch those despicable persons that try to do harm our children.

Current School Board President, Tania Knauer, has decided not to run for reelection this November. Originally she had filed for Park City District 3. Four candidates remain vying for that seat:

• Art Brothers
• Moe Hickey
• Kevin Kennedy
• Petra Butler

Ms Knauer provided this comment about her decision:

“I’ve been a volunteer in the district for 15 years, my youngest graduates this June and I’ve always said I’d graduate along with her. I’m ready to do some traveling and get involved in non-profits I’m passionate about.

In the last couple of years the board has:

• negotiated the licensed, classified and administrative contracts in a few months (compared to 18 months last time)
• had no additional tax increases and created a sustainable budget vs. two tax increases and expenses higher than revenue in the previous few years
• improved governance and transparency by cleaning up the policy committee, creating a board handbook to guide board operations and getting video meetings and other info online
• created a master plan and will come up with Plan B on implementation this year
• gone on a listening tour after the bond, improving community engagement thru different initiatives and hiring a communications specialist to help improve outreach.

There is still a ton of work to do, but we have a strong, knowledgeable board. We also have a full slate of candidates which offers choices for voters. It’s great to see new blood getting involved.“