The Fairfax County School Board is debating whether to delay changing middle school start times until after Fairfax County Public Schools completes its review of school boundary adjustments.
At a work session yesterday (Tuesday), the school board delved into several proposals from the North Carolina-based consulting firm Prismatic Services that would push middle school start times to 8 a.m. or later. Advocates say aligning start times with adolescent sleep patterns could improve students’ mental health and academic performance.
However, most school board members suggested they wait to act until they get boundary adjustment policy recommendations from Thru Consultant, a Connecticut-based consultant that’s expected to deliver a final report in late 2025.
“My daughter … started at 7:20 in the morning when she was in middle school all the way through two years of high school,” Braddock District Representative Rachna Sizemore Heizer said. “I know it’s hard, but we want to get it right, because we don’t want to disrupt their health by causing disruptions once and then disruptions again.”
What’s being considered
While FCPS has been tinkering with school hours since the early 1990s, momentum for reversing a trend toward earlier start times gained significant traction in the mid-2010s as parents, school administrators and health experts began highlighting scientific evidence of the benefits of sleep.
The school board voted in 2015 to bump high school start times from 7:20 a.m. to 8:10 a.m. and middle school start times from 7:20 a.m. to 7:30 a.m., with plans to explore additional delays for middle schools in the future.
Last year, the school board awarded Prismatic Services a contract to develop a plan for shifting middle school start times to 8 a.m. or later without altering high school start times or affecting the FCPS budget.
During this week’s work session, the Prismatic team outlined five scenarios that would start middle school classes as early as 8 a.m. or as late as 9:30 a.m., with additional transportation costs ranging from zero to $17.3 million annually, depending on the option.
Summary of proposed middle school start times options (via FCPS)
Balancing logistics and costs
Prismatic President and CEO Tatia Prieto told school board members that shifting middle school start times is closely tied to bus operations, which are currently optimized for the existing 110-minute school start time window from 7:30 a.m. to 9:20 a.m.
With their 7:30 a.m. starts, middle schools benefit from longer bus runs in the morning. Buses drop off their students first, then continue to high schools and elementary schools, maximizing efficiency.
Adjusting middle school start times would disrupt this system, Prieto said.
“Runs make routes in the world that we’re talking about,” she said. “So, an individual run is picking up students and dropping them at a school in the morning, or picking them up from a school and taking them home in the evening.”
According to Prieto, implementing new start times would require reorganizing the current bus schedules by combining individual bus runs into new routes to align with the adjusted start times.
The lowest-cost option, Option E, would largely preserve the existing bus routes while delaying start times for elementary, middle and high schools by 30 minutes. In this scenario, middle schools would start at 8 a.m.
In contrast, the most expensive option, Option D, would move middle school start times to 9 a.m. and require a complete overhaul of the bus system. It involves reorganizing bus routes and schedules across all school levels, and adding up to 150 buses to meet increased demand.
“Option D changes nothing except the middle school start time,” she said. “We knew that that would be something that people would want to look at, if only to see what the cost might be. It does not get all of the older students to an 8:30 [a.m.] or later school start time.”
Concerns about student disruption
While some school board members were open to the no-cost option, others were wary of any decision that could affect student transportation before the results of the ongoing boundary review are finalized.
Some worried that adjusting school start times and then potentially altering school assignments through boundary changes could cause significant upheaval for families and disrupt students’ routines.
“I’m certainly not interested in wreaking havoc on people,” Hunter Mill District Representative Melanie Meren said. “… I do think it needs to be simultaneous with the boundaries.”
At-Large Representative Ryan McElveen, however, argued that delaying start times should “take priority over a boundary study.”
“I have no desire to wait for a boundary study to embark on this work,” he said. “There’s nothing more important we can do than work to improve our student health at a time of mental health crises and just other things that we can’t control. This is something we can control, and I don’t think we can wait.”
Echoing McElveen’s concerns, Mason District Representative Ricardy Anderson expressed support for the no-cost option of delaying school start times by 30 minutes for all grades.
“Doing nothing is really not an option,” she said.
Anderson suggested the board adopt a phased approach to boundary adjustments — an idea she has advocated for on previous occasions — to minimize disruption and maintain stability for students during the transition.
Next steps
Superintendent Michelle Reid proposed developing multiple implementation scenarios for the board to consider, including options for aligning start time changes either in parallel or sequentially with boundary adjustments.
“That would give the Board something to study, because different scenarios have very different bodies of work,” Reid said.
While the school board didn’t make a decision, several members voiced support for staff returning at a later date with a list of recommendations.
