State law leads to longer days for Petaluma high school students

A state mandate that high school classes may not begin before 8:30 a.m. was intended to provide teenagers with a little more sleep. But at Petaluma and Casa Grande high schools it has led to longer days, with normal school days now ending at 3:20 p.m. instead of at 3 p.m. as in past years, and Wednesday “short day” classes extended by 40 minutes – adding up to two more hours of class time per week.

The legislation, Senate Bill 328, was passed in 2019 amid mounting evidence that teens’ natural sleep-wake cycles are different from those of children and adults, making it difficult for them to get a good night's sleep if school starts too early.

California is the first state to enact such a law, which went into effect July 1 – meaning for local schools it applied to the 2021-22 school year.

The mandated later start to the school day didn’t directly affect Petaluma’s high schools. All already have, and have had for a number of years, an 8:30 opening bell. What changed was that the state said no class that starts before 8:30 could count toward the minimum number of required instructional minutes.

That decision means that the Petaluma and Casa Grande early morning “Zero Period” classes can no longer be counted as instructional minutes, leaving both schools shy of the state requirement. To compensate, the schools added time at the other end of the school day.

“We didn’t have much of a choice,” said Petaluma City Schools Superintendent Matthew Harris. “I want to make sure our students are getting the same number (of educational minutes) as everyone else.”

Harris said that in both schools’ Zero Period classes – there are seven available to students at Petaluma and six at Casa Grande – students still get credit for taking those classes. But for the schools, those classes do not count as instructional minutes.

Harris noted that Petaluma students aren’t the only ones impacted by longer school days. “We’re playing by the same set of rules as everyone else in the state,” he said. “We just have to make it work.”

Petaluma High School athletic director and government teacher Kevin Jackson said there have been some problems with the new schedule, especially for students with after-school activities such as band.

“There are some pressure points,” he said. “I think it was a shock to the system at first, but I think we have kind of settled in at this point.”

“It was the best schedule we could come up with,” said Casa Grande High School Principal Dan Ostermann. “We didn’t find out until late summer that it was happening.” He acknowledged there have been some challenges.

One big challenge for Casa Grande was getting the new bell schedule in sync with the Petaluma Transit bus schedule. “The transit people were wonderful,” Ostermann said. “It was amazing the speed they made the changes we needed.”

The last-minute nature of the change was underscored in a recent article in the Trojan Tribune, Petaluma High’s student newspaper, which notes that administrators and staff approved the schools’ new bell schedule in the week before school began – “a very short amount of time,” Petaluma High School Principal Giovanni Napoli told the paper.

Ostermann stressed that his school’s new bell schedule is not set in stone. “October is going to be a big feedback month,” he said. “We are really looking forward to gathering data from families and others to find out what people think.”

Casa Grande Athletic Director and head football coach John Antonio acknowledged that sports programs have had to make adjustments.

“We pushed our practice back a little bit,” he said. “It makes for a little longer day, but the kids seem to be handling it pretty well.”

More problematic are teams that play afternoon events like tennis, golf and volleyball, which were among the first to be affected by the new schedule.

“We’ve talked as a league (Vine Valley Athletic League) about starting games a little later,” Antonio said. “A lot of kids are going to be affected.”

At Petaluma High, Jackson said athletes seem to be “hot or cold” about the change. “They are adjusting,” he said.

Henry Ellis, the Petaluma High School quarterback and senior class president, summed up the feeling of most of the young athletes who just want to play. “I don’t like like it too much,” he said. “But it doesn’t bother me too much.” Ellis is one of the students who skips sleep to attend a Zero Period class, taking AP Government and Economy. He gets credit, but the school does not.

Maya Hoffman, a junior at Petaluma High School who plays for the tennis team, said this year’s bell schedule means later start times for her after-school practices and matches. She said she takes six AP classes and crams studying and homework in during those matches, and often doesn’t get home until 7 p.m.

Her teammate Isabella Prandi, a sophomore at Petaluma High, said that during a recent match she told her doubles partner, “Don’t worry, we will tie and then we’ll win. And we’ll do it quick because we’ve got homework!”