East Principal Dr. Scott Sherman announced that school will begin at 7:35 from March 23 to April 9 in an email to parents.
The decision was due to several canceled school days that took away time from seniors’ required graduation minutes — which the five-minute addition will partially account for.
The four snow days met the limit to which seniors could still receive full credit, but the Chiefs’ Superbowl Parade exceeded it. And the power outage cancellation on Feb. 24 brought the number of minutes that need to be made up to four hours and three minutes.
But this change will only gain back a fraction of the minutes that the seniors need. Another component to the school’s plan is to have seniors participate in a “Senior-to-Senior” activity on April 10 — in which seniors will interview a senior citizen in the community and write an essay about what they learned — to add three make-up hours.
There will also no longer be weekly late starts on Thursdays — where the school day starts at 8:50 a.m. instead of 7:40 a.m. — as of April 2 and going on through the rest of fourth quarter.
“This is a change from our original schedule, which we need to do in order to ensure that our high school students have sufficient minutes of instruction per Kansas Department of Education guidelines to be able to graduate,” Sherman wrote in the email.
The school day will only start five minutes earlier for 13 days — March 23 to April 9. March 26 will be the last late start, despite falling within the time range.
After April 9, school will return to its normal start time of 7:40 on April 14 since there will be no school on Friday, April 10 — a professional learning day — and Monday, April 13.