Please keep Dist. 15 start times the same

On March 12, the District 15 board of education is scheduled to vote on whether to change the bell times for elementary and junior high students for the 2008-09 school year. I am writing to encourage the board members to vote against any change.

The proposed schedule presented at the Feb. 13 meeting will result in students waiting at bus stops as early as 6:45 a.m. This is extremely early, and will affect parochial students as young as kindergarten. All junior high students will be released from school at 2:10, so many 13- and 14-year-olds will be at home, unsupervised, for an extra half hour each afternoon.

Many late-tier elementary students will not be home until after 4 p.m., making it difficult to participate in extracurricular activities like music, sports and Scouts.

Changing bell times is not only annoying and inconvenient for the thousands of families impacted, it is also apparently very difficult for the D15 staff to manage. When new schedules were introduced this school year, there were lots of logistical problems that required significant rework by the transportation department and outside consultants. It took the district months to get all the kinks worked out.

Now that we are past the initial fall 2007 busing problems, the present two-tier system is working pretty well. The supposed advantages of the three-tier proposal are lower costs and shorter bus rides. I strongly suspect that the present two-tier system can be further refined and optimized to realize similar benefits. My daughter rides on a full-size bus with fewer than 20 passengers, and it somehow takes her over 30 minutes to get to school; we can certainly do better than this.

I have spoken with dozens of parents on this subject and have yet to find a single parent who is in favor of a schedule change. I encourage the board to consider the well-being of the most important stakeholders in the district, the students. Keep the schedule as it is and focus on improving efficiency on the present bell schedule.

Bob Freer

Rolling Meadows