Balanced school day will continue, school board decides

Staff and students at Greenwood Public School are singing the praises of a balanced school day.

Principal Shelley Gold and Vice Principal Brent Vallee (both shown) gave a presentation and answered questions on their experience with the revised eating schedule at this week's meeting of the Algoma District School Board.

Vice Principal Vallee said that the two shorter nutrition breaks have drastically reduced the number of behavioural incidents on the playground.

"Traditionally speaking, most of the difficulties that you have in a school happen during the last 20 minutes of a traditional lunch period when they start getting bored and restless," Vallee said. "That's when they get into trouble. So with the two breaks instead of the one, we found that it cut down a lot."

In the balanced school day program, students at four schools in Sault Ste. Marie have their days divided into three 100-minute instructional blocks and two 45-minute nutritional breaks.

Last June, Greenwood, Parkland, Pinewood and River View Public Schools were selected to give the balanced school day a test drive.

"One of the challenges that we had to work with was educating all our parents and making sure that they had enough information about how the balanced school day would actually benefit their child, said Greenwood Principal Gold.

"One of the things we particularly emphasized was, because the day looks different with the breakdown of two nutrition breaks, how do you pack a lunch appropriately for two nutrition breaks?"

Gold said that some parents were resistant to change of any kind, but most responses to the program were positive.

In a presentation to the board, Superintendent of Education Carole McPhee indicated that 183 surveys were returned from the four schools.

Survey findings

Would you be in favour of continuing the balanced school day?

- students: 80.96% yes, 13.04% no - parents: 79.78% yes, 20.22% no - teachers: 95.45% yes, 14.55% no - principals: 100% yes - non-teaching staff: 76.93% yes, 23.08% no

Other benefits cited by McPhee included more hands-on and planning time for instruction, which she said appeared to improve the general classroom experience for both students and teachers.

"We noticed that the atmosphere at these schools was generally more calm, that the students were more focused and productive," said McPhee.

Algoma District School Board has decided to continue the program in these four schools and to open it up for other schools to join.

"Principals are being asked to indicate their interest and rationale in the next few weeks," said McPhee. "Then we will begin the process of possibly selecting more schools for the pilot next year."