The Jefferson County Public Schools District is considering changing start times for their schools and wants input from the community. 

The district, responsible for more than 80,000 students, launched a survey on Thursday. The feedback will be used by the district in their planning for the potential change, officials said. 

“There is an urgency around making this change in the best interest of our students, while also taking the time to understand the challenges that changing start and end times for the upcoming school year may present for our students and families,” officials wrote on the district’s website. 

District officials said the move is intended to help its students’ mental health and create equitable instruction as research shows later start times improve attendance, students arriving on time and graduation rates. 

For instance, a study by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that students who attend schools with later start times show “significant improvements in benchmarks of health and academic success in a variety of settings.”

There are more than 100 schools within Jefferson County Public Schools District and each have different start times. Some begin as early as 7:15 a.m. while others begin at 9 a.m. The time variations create different lengths of day at different schools and unequal amounts of in-classroom instruction.

A proposed schedule change would have elementary schools begin earlier and older levels begin later, while also keeping each length of day between six hours and 35 minutes to seven hours and 15 minutes.

For instance, in the western schools, elementary school would begin at 7:55 a.m. while the high schools would begin at 8:40 a.m.

In the current proposal, schools in Conifer and Evergreen would be exempt from the time changes “in order to accommodate the challenging topography of the Conifer and Evergreen mountain communities, which greatly affects length of travel time between student homes, bus stops and schools,” according to the proposal. 

School districts across the country in recent years have been pushing back start times due to these studies. California instituted a state law that mandated later school start times in 2019.

In Colorado, Denver Public Schools has committed to pushing back start times beginning next fall. Similar to Jefferson County, DPS sent out a survey to its families this week asking for feedback.

Discussions about establishing equitable start times for the district’s schools in the west area began in 2016 when a group of Evergreen parents approached then-Community Superintendent Dan Cohan.

Another parent then asked then Superintendent Jason Glass to begin looking into changes to start times in September 2017. A task force was formed and began exploring all options. To date, the task force has presented their findings to the district’s board of education four times, most recently last month.