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Targeting middle school start times and bell-to-bell issue, APS adjusts school bell schedules for 2024-2025
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Albuquerque Public Schools has adjusted schools’ bell schedules, addressing some of the concerns expressed by educators and parents throughout this school year.
Earlier start times for middle schoolers and time for educators for duty and prep time were among the issues driving the changes, district spokesman Martin Salazar said in an email.
“The input that we received over the last year was a factor in the ... upcoming start times,” Salazar told the Journal.
Changes to elementary school start times are split mostly into four camps with some exceptions: one in which they will start 35 minutes earlier, one in which they will start 35 minutes later, one in which they will start an hour and 10 minutes later, and one in which no change was made from the current school year.
Middle schools largely will start earlier in the 2024-2025 school year, while high schools generally will begin around the same time they did this school year.
The bell schedules were posted to the district website on Tuesday.
Responses to the new bell schedules have been mixed.
Some criticized the schedules of their individual schools, with one Montezuma Elementary School teacher expressing concern during a Wednesday night school board meeting about a lack of communication with her school community.
“The changes to the bell schedule that were recently released were made without any input from our community,” she said. “It kind of came out of the blue.”
Some said there was some good in the changes, like Meghan Armstrong, a parent of two APS students in different schools, who said at least her family gets an “extra 30 minutes to prepare and sleep in in the morning.“
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While Bandelier Elementary School parents such as Armstrong have expressed concerns this year about school beginning at 7:30 a.m., she noted her children — the other goes to Jefferson Middle School — had almost swapped places now that Bandelier will begin at 9:15 a.m. in the coming school year.
“It’s just different for different families,” she said.
Salazar said that APS “would love to have a single bell schedule, but the logistics of busing just doesn’t make that possible.”
APS has 281 district and contract bus drivers, Salazar said. There are 30 bus driver vacancies, though those are being filled, just by standby drivers and staff who are properly certified but whose job titles are not “bus driver.”
In an ideal world, the district said it would take a total of about 352 bus drivers to get all elementary schools on the same bell schedules.
Problems addressedBy and large, instructional days next school year will be shorter, Salazar said in the email.
That move was, in part, aimed at addressing what’s known as a “bell-to-bell” schedule, in which teachers lost paid time for tasks like bus duty and were beginning and ending their work days at the same time school was, despite still needing to do the other work.
That problem was brought about by legislation approved by state lawmakers last year increasing the minimum amount of time schools must spend with students in class.
To help address the issue, the district and teachers union worked out stipends to pay educators for duty time, and in February, APS approved an academic calendar that added instructional days, partly in an effort to provide 15-minute periods for teachers to complete that work.
“During the 2024-2025 school year, K-12 teachers will have 15 minutes built into their paid hours to cover morning or afternoon duties,” Salazar wrote.
APS also largely shifted the start times of middle schoolers, bumping them up earlier by an hour and 10 minutes to an 8:05 a.m. start time.
That’s with the exception of Roosevelt Middle School, which is in Tijeras and will begin at 8 a.m., a start time that is actually 15 minutes later than this school year.
“Specifically, we received feedback from families who said the current 9:15 a.m.-4:15 p.m. school day often hindered after-school athletics and activities,” Salazar wrote. “Starting in August, most APS middle school students will begin class at 8:05 a.m. and be dismissed at 2:50 p.m.”
When the bell schedules were first announced, many educators at Transformational Opportunity Pilot Schools — some 21 APS elementary schools that currently hold longer days and school years — criticized the changes, Albuquerque Teachers Federation President Ellen Bernstein told the Journal.
They cited later start and end times, from 9:15 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., which were actually almost identical to this school year’s middle school times.
“(A) lot of the educators said, ‘No, this is too late for little kids. They don’t do well that late,’ ” Bernstein said.
But APS quickly pivoted, bumping all 21 schools to earlier start times.
“(That) was very responsive of them,” Bernstein said. “So that’s great.”
