Trading down time for class time

Longview plans to reduce lunch time in bid to reverse pandemic-related learning declines. It's worth giving it a try.

Repeated studies have shown that children who can’t read at grade level before entering fifth grade often are headed for lifelong trouble. 

They are far less likely to graduate from high school and are at higher risk of growing into functionally illiterate adults who find it harder to  earn a living wage, win workplace promotions, buy homes, afford health care or support a family. 

They are more likely to become unemployed, depressed, jailed, addicted, mentally ill and homeless.

So the fact that more than 60% of Longview elementary school students don’t meet state reading standards is a crisis — a crisis that is an aftershock of pandemic-related learning losses.

Should the Longview elementary students trade lunch and play time for more class time to reverse the tide? 

Longview school administrators are planning to increase instruction time by 35 minutes a day by reducing lunch and recess time by 10 minutes each and moving the 15-minute breakfast period to before the opening bell. 

The move will not cost anything extra, and it makes total sense that giving students more instruction time with certified teachers will make them learn better, Longview School Superintendent Dan Zorn says. 

“Teachers working with kids — that’s how kids learn. It stands to reason to me that more quality instruction time increases achievement levels,” Zorn told me last week.

Critics assert that kids won’t have enough time for lunch and — most pointedly — that the district is ignoring research that recess and exercise help improve learning by making kids more attentive and reducing discipline problems.

“I just think increasing instruction should not come at the expense of time for student well-being,” said Danica Burns, a Longview mother of two students and PTO member.

She is a member of a group called “Save Recess and Lunch in the Longview School District.“ The group’s online petition asking the district to abandon the plan had received about 700 signatures as of late last week.

The schedule change means that next school year students will have 20 minutes for lunch and two recess periods totaling 35 minutes daily. This leaves the district’s recess allotment in the range of most other local school districts and in compliance with a new state law requiring at least 30 minutes a day.

The district’s plan will ask teachers to focus the extra class time on reading and math, Zorn said. It adds nearly 8% of instruction time to the 7.5-hour school day. It’s like adding about 15 full days to a 180-day school year.

“Thirty-five minutes a day is real time. We’re not talking five minutes,” Zorn said.

The extra time will help teachers adopt a promising new reading curriculum, he added.

The district’s plan is an attempt to address an educational crisis that schools across the nation are facing due to pandemic-related shutdowns and disruptions.  

In Longview’s case, the district had been making steady gains and approaching state averages for several years. The pandemic more than wiped out those gains, and achievement is not rebounding.

Only 44.6% of Longview fifth graders, 33% of fourth graders and 34.6% of third graders met standards in the state’s spring 2022 reading test. Scores were slightly better in science but much lower in math.

(Zorn will present preliminary 2023 results to the school board Monday night, but he said results are not significantly different from 2022 scores.)

“We lost some significant ground” due to the pandemic, Zorn said, who prefers to call the situation ”concerning” rather than a crisis, as I do.

Zorn acknowledges that there isn’t much research showing that increased instruction time drives up learning for elementary school students who already are succeeding. However, “the research is clear” that additional teaching helps students who are struggling, he said.

Nevertheless, critics of the plan assert it clashes with another noteworthy goal: keeping kids active, healthy and ready to learn. They complain that the move goes against research showing that more recess time and physical activity leads to improved attention spans and reduced discipline problems. They are advocating 60 minutes of recess — nearly double the amount pupils would have under the new plan and 15 minutes more than they’ve had up to now.

“Longview School District should be looking into supplying our students with MORE recess and physical activity (not taking away from the little time they have) if their mission is to raise academic achievement levels,” according to the opposition’s Facebook page.

It accuses the district of using kids as experimental guinea pigs, that the district is “sorely misguided” and that it’s “shocking” that the district is taking “uneducated and unsupported” measures. 

Another concern is that kids will have too little time for lunch and that moving breakfast to before school disrupts routines and other opportunities. (Breakfast, though, was served before school prior to the pandemic. And the district notes it will make lunch service faster by serving it in gyms, where food trays will be set out in advance of students’ arrival. Longview students traditionally have eaten lunch in classrooms,)

Zorn rejects the idea that the district’s plan is “experimental,” although he says staff will closely monitor how the plan works. 

“We’re not experimenting. We’re providing kids with more time to learn,” he said, adding that the plan was developed with the assistance of elementary school principals.

There clearly is a symbiotic relationship between instruction and play, where each supports the other.  The question, as Zorn notes, is achieving a balance.  

There’s no doubt about the value of recess and exercise, especially in a community with obesity and attention deficit troubles.

“School boards, superintendents, principals and teachers can feel confident that providing recess to students on a regular basis has a positive effect on learning and academic achievement,” according to the Centers for Disease Control.

But more exercise is not a panacea, either. Critics of the Longview  plan note that Kelso schools give kids more recess time. Kelso’s 2022 elementary grade test scores were somewhat higher than Longview’s.  However,  attributing the difference to just one is factor is foolhardy.  Many factors — classes sizes, curriculum, ethnic and student socioeconomic makeup, the extent of parental involvement, to name just a few  — affect how well students learn.

There also can be no doubt that a lot of learning can occur in an extra half hour — as long as it is used in a concentrated way. But at what  point does more instruction become too much and burns kids out? 

Over the years, many teachers have confided to me their frustration with a loss of teaching time to a host of nonacademic disruptions. Giving them another 35 minutes of instruction time seems like a commonsense thing to do. 

What other alternatives are out there to address this urgent problem?

Lengthening the school day by a half hour would cost several million dollars. Would voters support a school tax levy to pay for this if officials made a convincing case?

I wish the school district had put more of the $20 million it received in federal COVID recovery money into tutoring and other academic means to help kids rebound. 

The district is using some of that money for additional tutoring and summer school, and also applied COVID funds to buy the new reading curriculum that Zorn is so optimistic about. But it also spent a lot of the funds on HVAC and other building improvements. At a certain point, though, this thinking becomes a financial shell game. Buildings eventually need upkeep.

I also wish the district had gone through a more public process and involved the school board before adopting the plan administratively. Zorn said he kept the board informed, and the board typically does not weigh in on scheduling and instructional matters.

Still, a constructive public dialogue and exploration of possible alternatives perhaps could have averted some of the angst the plan has generated. At the same time, however, I wish opponents weren’t so shrill. Their rhetoric impedes good dialogue and is symptomatic of the hostile tone of that inhibits sound public debate these days.

It may be time to hold a community summit about how how schools and parents can do a better job educating our kids. Many of them are facing difficult futures if they don’t learn better.

For now, though, the plan to capture 35 minutes of extra instruction time is not a major change in the school day, and I can't see it having dire consequences. It’s worth trying.