Start Time Committee Chooses Traffic Consultant

start-time-committee-fi

By Bill Slocum
Contributing Editor

A transportation consultant has been chosen in connection with an initiative for changing public-school start times.

At a meeting of the School Start Time-Steering Committee Tuesday, it was announced that School Bus Consultants of Edgewater, Md., had been made the unanimous choice of a subcommittee, which reviewed bids by two vendors.

“While (the other contractor) hadn’t done exclusively student transportation, with School Bus Consultants, that’s their business,” steering committee member Jim Hricay reported.

Hricay, who is also managing director of operations for the Board of Education, added that a contract with the firm is presently being negotiated.

Hricay’s announcement was a highlight of a Steering Committee meeting that also reviewed how to charge another contractor, Hanover Research, with the responsibility of focusing existing research around the key concern of moving up school start times to accommodate student sleep needs. While committee members were in agreement that more sleep has proven health and performance benefits, they agreed more data is needed as to whether children use the extra time for sleeping, or whether they would use the time to stay up later.

“We want to explore some of the outcomes we can anticipate and expect,” steering committee Chair Cynthia Womack explained. “We’re still trying to iron that out.”

Womack added that the committee’s brief to Hanover Research is still in the process of being finalized, and should be completed before their next meeting on Jan. 21.

The steering committee is composed of parents, community members, and Greenwich Board of Education staff. During the session, discussion centered on how broad their directions to Hanover Research should be.

Members agreed that they have a “well-formed hypothesis” on the table that sleep deprivation has a negative impact on students. But several agreed that it was important to give Hanover Research, an Arlington, Virginia-based consultancy, enough leeway to draw educated conclusions, rather than pre-formed ones.

“The goal of the questions we generated is to help us identify the differences we should see and expect as a result of a later school start time, the effects on academics, emotional and social health and well being of students and what can Greenwich Public Schools learn from other districts that have made the change,” read a statement passed out at the meeting.

The selection of a transportation consultant is critical as busing will be an important element of implementing any start-time change plan. In accepting School Bus Consultants, the report passed out by Hricay identified similar projects SBC undertook in Virginia Beach, Va., and Worcester, Mass., as well as a current project underway in Nashville, Tenn. SBC, the report concluded, has “the proven experience.”

Hricay also cited SBC’s current use of the town Board of Education’s existing transportation software system, Edulog, which would mean a cost-savings to the town. Also a potential cost-savings, Hricay added, was the fact neither SBC nor the other traffic consultant interviewed, Prismatic Services, felt a new traffic study is needed.

“They didn’t seem to think it was warranted for a school district in the Northeast,” Hricay said. “They said in their experiences, water seeks its own level.”

Such a study has been cited as one of the key reasons for achieving start-time changes later rather than sooner.

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