When looking at how homeroom should be this year, Principal Michael Grove was searching for “a community to build relationships between students and staff.” To do this, the administration opposed the idea of eliminating one to two homeroom days a week to add more teacher collaboration time and instead opted for late starts and reduced the number of minimum days, said Grove.
When discussing changes for the 2010-2011 school year, the need for more collaboration time was presented, said Grove. Teacher collaboration time is for staff members to get together and discuss what methods work best for them when teaching. These hours are vital to helping improve class time. In the past, collaboration time occurred during minimum days when students are out having fun, but trying to get teachers to work on minimum days is difficult, said Grove.
“We looked at the bell schedule for times to add collaboration hours. There were three things we could adjust, minimum days, hour lunch and homeroom,” said Grove. Hour lunch immediately was eliminated as a choice because the staff recognized the importance of hour lunch to the students, said Grove.
Grove felt homeroom was “not perfect,” so the staff chose to initiative a list of guidelines for how homeroom should work. Staff viewed homeroom as a bit of a free for all, and decided a set list of guidelines would solve this problem, said Grove. With hour lunch out of the picture, and homeroom altered to have a basic list of expectations, staff looked towards altering minimum days.
Administration moved towards a late start model to find more collaboration time. “Most of the staff had never had a late start schedule and were supportive of it,” said Grove. Additionally parents tend to like late starts better because they give students fewer chances to get in trouble while sleeping, said Grove. Late starts will occur once a month on a Wednesday and there will still be hour lunch on those days.