Submitted by Amy Harr, Riverside, GHS parent of both start times
There’s a saying: “You show me your budget, and I’ll show you your values.”
As everyone now knows, the Republican-controlled Board of Estimation and Taxation (BET) cut $4 million from the proposed Greenwich Public School (GPS) budget, asserting “careful stewardship” of our tax dollars.
Greenwich is one of the wealthiest towns in the U.S., with exceptionally low property taxes. In fact, our current mill rate of 11.71 is the fourth lowest out of 169 towns in Connecticut, far below the state average of 28.82 and comfortably below those of “comparable” towns, including New Canaan (16.14), Darien (14.69), Westport (18.62) and Fairfield (27.9). The BET currently plans to raise the mill rate to only 12.18 next year, continuing to secure our exceedingly low tax-rate status.
If the BET wanted to reverse its $4 million GPS cut and properly fund our schools next year, all it would have had to do is increase the mill rate by a further 0.11 – about the price of a cup of cold-brew coffee per Greenwich resident per month. But the Board refused.
Fiscal responsibility is one thing. Being Scrooge is another. Make no mistake, this needless cut will seriously undermine our students’ success, and potentially their health, for years to come.
Despite these facts, and subsequent overwhelming – and bipartisan – pleas from the BOE, First Selectman, RTM, and hundreds of families warning that these cuts will harm students, the BET hasn’t budged. The Board asserts in its May 11 Greenwich Time opinion piece that its cuts “protect students,” yet it only offers vague areas to look for cost efficiencies, with no specific line items or data to back up its claims. Now, the BOE must do the Executioner’s work of
choosing from a menu of awful options to make cuts to our public schools.
However, among all the options on the chopping block, moving GHS start times before 8:30am should not even be considered, for the following reasons.
1. Earlier start times will harm all GHS students through institutionally mandated sleep deprivation. The sleep math just doesn’t work. Teenagers’ circadian rhythms make it difficult to fall asleep before 11:00pm, and they require 8.5–9.5 hours of sleep. It is scientific fact. With a 7:30am start (and worse yet, 6:30am bus pick-up), achieving enough sleep is mathematically impossible.
This isn’t controversial: the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American Medical Association (AMA), and American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) all agree that start times before 8:30am harm student health. California and New York have forbidden high school starts before 8:30am, and other states are considering it, including Connecticut. If Greenwich makes this cut, it would be willfully ignoring the experts and deliberately harming our students.
2. Sleep deprivation has severe, documented effects that most parents don’t want for their children:
• Higher risk of depression, anxiety, academic failure, and injury
• Increased traffic accidents, especially dire among new teen drivers
• Increased stimulant use: super-caffeinated drinks, shared prescriptions of Adderall and Ritalin, and illicit drugs
• Long-term, irreversible harm to development; lost biological activity from lack of sleep cannot be “made up” later, per renowned sleep expert Matthew Walker
• Worse nutrition: teens are less likely to eat healthy breakfasts at 6:10am, leading to ultra-processed fast-food consumption, sugar cravings/crashes, and fatigue
3. With early start times, communities have learned that much of today’s “savings” will only be converted to costs tomorrow: ER visits, medical and mental health services, poorer academic performance and lower future earnings, public-safety expenses, lost productivity, substance-abuse treatment etc. However, those costs won’t appear on the BET’s ledger.
4. Most critically: changing GHS to an earlier school start time will be nearly impossible to reverse back to 8:30am in the future. A high school’s entire community coalesces around school start times; transportation infrastructure and systems, extracurricular activities/schedules, traffic patterns, family logistics and more have to be reorganized and rebuilt, at cost and effort to stakeholders. Therefore, once implemented, the structural and financial inertia behind the new schedule will make it exceedingly difficult to revert back to an 8:30am start time if a future budget increase is approved. Thus, even if the BET makes mid-year financial adjustments “if student needs truly cannot be met,” it will be too late to rescue school start times.
I want to re-emphasize this: if the BOE reverts GHS to an early school start time, it’s almost certainly a permanent change.
In view of this, it is mind-blowingly irresponsible that reverting school start times is even on the table without any due diligence or data-driven analysis of the short and long-term potential impact and costs on our students and community.
Here’s a better path: the BET purported to offer a compromise of $2 million in GPS cuts versus $4 million during the budget process.
Can we put that back on the table to avert a crisis?
The BOE has already voted on $2 million in cuts, so I urge the BET to compromise now in order to fulfill its commitment to protect our children’s health, education, and safety.
All it would cost is the price of a cold-brew coffee for each Greenwich resident, now only once every two months. If that’s not worth it, I don’t know what is.