2025-26 School Year 1-hr Late Start for ALL Schools

May 6, 2025

Hello Eagle Point School District Families,

Next year the District will begin holding late-starts on Wednesdays and, except for one day on February 27, 2026, we will not have professional development days. Class time on Late-Start Wednesdays will begin an hour later than other days of the week. The purpose for this change is to provide time -every week- for teacher teams to meet and review student data and to use this information to directly improve instruction in the classroom. The short-hand educators use for this time is called ‘PLC time’. PLC is an acronym for ‘Professional Learning Communities’.

It is our intent for PLC Time to be used for identifying and acting on student performance data that benefits our students in the classroom immediately. Additionally, we view this practice as a powerful tool for improving instruction long-term. These PLC meetings are basically teachers working to make each other better teachers. Eagle Point leaders see this change as essential to improving student performance. To ensure success our District has put a large amount of time, energy and resources into preparing for this change. We want our staff to have the necessary tools and data going into the team meetings, the ability to use the information effectively to produce concrete improvements in the classroom. 

The District Leadership discussed putting into place an early release schedule rather than a late-start. We decided against this option because EPSD9 has tried this practice in the past with limited success. At that time, we found our middle schools and high schools struggled with student supervision as students waited for activities and sports to begin until teachers (coaches) had completed their time reviewing student data. This led to PLCs not meeting, not able to focus on the work at hand or breaking up early.  As well, during early-release our District experienced elevated rates of staff absenteeism, as staff used ‘non-instructional time’ to schedule appointments. This practice, while in a sense understandable again, contributed to teacher teams not being able to meet. Lastly, we struggled to balance the time each school had for PLC meetings due to the requirements of transportation. As stated earlier, EPSD9 has sunk a tremendous amount of resources into making this effort successful and we cannot afford to repeat earlier mistakes.

While Eagle Point School District sees the need to move to late-start Wednesdays as our best option for success, we also recognize that implementing a late start will impact families. Please feel free to share your thoughts and concerns with school leaders so that we can use the information in making future decisions and consider possible solutions.