In the 2025-2026 school year, school days will become seven minutes longer starting at 8:21 a.m. while still ending at 3:17 p.m. The district decided to begin the school day earlier to have professional development days during the school year without reducing student learning overall. Rockwood Communications Director, Mary Lapak said that having professional development days in the summer was not popular amongst teachers, so moving these days into the school year was more favorable in general.
“In response to feedback we received from teachers through our Employee Experience Survey, the district wanted to integrate professional development days directly into the school year, ensuring timely access for all staff and timely implementation for all students. Overwhelmingly, we have heard from staff that having [professional development] days in the summer is not ideal for teachers, and we know as educators that [professional development] is most effective if educators participate during the school year when they can implement what they’ve learned in their classrooms,” Lapak said.
The extra minutes got added to the start of the day rather than the ending later due to staff worrying that if the extra minutes went to the end of the day it would be interrupting after school activities.
“We chose to add those minutes to the start of the school day because we heard the concerns expressed by staff about adding minutes after school impacting high school activities and concerns from our late start schools about trying to make appointments after school. We also had to work within the confines of a tiered transportation system, so adding the minutes at the start of the day made the most sense,” Lapak said.
Many teachers feel that having the professional development day during the school year will work better to incorporate ideas that come up in the meetings into the classroom. English teacher Emily Cissi said that she prefers these development days to be during the school year instead of during summer because she agrees that students will get the benefits from teachers being able to apply these ideas into the classroom.
“I think the primary focus for teachers was that we were doing professional development in the summer, and then we couldn’t implement it into our classrooms. Now we can still do learning over the summer, but we can actually have time during the school year to make changes to things and implement them, because we never really had enough time to meet or to plan or to learn new things during the school year,” Cissi said.
Students seem to be indifferent to this new start. Sophomore Samuel Hill expects this time change will have little to no impact; if any, the early start would have a positive effect on students.
“It’s seven minutes earlier, it really isn’t a bad thing. It’s not much of a difference. I think it’s gonna help people wake up earlier and get used to waking up earlier,” Hill said
School starting earlier will also allow one extra day of summer, school will be starting August 18th, instead of the 19th and ending May 22nd, instead of 24th. Junior Claire Worley is happy to savor the extra day of relaxation that will be given to students.
“I think it’ll be fun [ to have one more day of summer],” Worley said.
