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The San Ramon Valley school district appears set to revamp its homework rules, with the school board reviewing recommended changes to the existing district-wide policy Tuesday night.
The revised administrative regulation would set nightly and weekly homework limits per course across all grade-levels whereas the current regulation, established in June 2008, sets guidelines for maximum overall homework time allowed each night.
The revision would also ban mandatory work during school breaks and outline homework “responsibilities” for students, teachers, principals, and parents and guardians.
“What we’ve done here is we’ve designed a regulation underneath the (board) policy that provides time-based guidelines that are now going to go back to the school sites to figure out what the philosophy should be underneath those time-based guidelines,” school board member Mark Jewett noted during the meeting in Danville.
The homework regulation was a discussion-only item for the school board Tuesday night. The board is expected to consider final action on the revised policy later this month, according to board president Denise Jennison.
The changes
The draft regulation revision was developed by a 26-person committee of teachers, students, parents, site administrators and school board members with key goals such as reducing overall homework volume, eliminating work over school breaks, and aligning the policy more with the Common Core State Standards, district officials said.
It also aims to improve implementation and enforcement by clearly stating what is and isn’t allowed under district homework rules, according to Jason Reimann, director of instructional services for secondary education.
“We believe that these revisions represent a step forward in reducing student stress and aligning our work with the instructional needs of our students and our schools,” Reimann told the school board to open the 50-minute public discussion.
For comprehensive high schools, homework assignments per course could not exceed 30 minutes per night or weekend and two hours per week. The existing regulation places a guideline of “an estimated completion time of three hours or less” for all nightly homework.
The revised regulation states that certain high school electives such as speech and debate, music and drama could require additional time, and it exempts Advanced Placement (AP), honors and advanced courses from its provisions.
Board member Rachel Hurd, who sat on the revision committee, said AP-specific guidelines should be developed separately from the overall homework policy overhaul.
“We decided that (AP) was another whole committee because we clearly did not have the people in the room nor even the charge to go there. Again, that needs to come out in deeper conversations,” she said. “But we also felt very strongly that we wanted to put something forward to help for the coming school year.”
Del Amigo Continuation High School and Venture Independent Study School would need to develop site-based homework rules because of the “unique nature of their respective programs,” according to the proposal.
For middle schools, there could be no more than one hour, 20 minutes of homework per course per week and no more than 20 minutes per course per night, under the recommended regulation.
Nightly elementary school limits would depend on grade level, with no more than 30 minutes for kindergarten and first grade, no more than 45 minutes for second and third grades, and no more than an hour for fourth- and fifth-graders. Those time-frames would include any mandatory at-home reading.
The revision would prohibit all homework, except for reading, during the weekend for elementary school students.
Teachers could assign project work as homework, but “these tasks shall not require significant assistance from parents or the purchase of materials,” under the proposed regulation.
At elementary and middle school levels, group projects could not require in-person meetings outside of the classroom. The committee supported this ban primarily for safety reasons, Hurd said.
The new regulations would prohibit homework assignments and mandatory project work during Thanksgiving, winter and spring breaks. It would also, in the interest of balance, require high school departments to “collaborate with each other and be aware of long-term projects/assignments and major tests in all curricular areas.”
Public comments
Three people spoke to the board about the homework regulation during citizen comment Tuesday night. There were about a dozen audience members in the room by the time the discussion began, just after 9:30 p.m.
Laura Finco, an eighth-grade science teacher at Alamo’s Stone Valley Middle School, opposed the new proposal and instead urged the board to find ways to enhance enforcement of the existing regulation.
“My feeling is that this push toward more control over homework comes from a vocal minority and restricts as well as questions professionalism of our educators,” she told the board. “The horror stories you hear are rare.”
Finco, who said she doesn’t issue routine homework but does assign out-of-class projects that take multiple weeks, added that completing at-home work “is part of growing up and learning time management.”
“Homework is important,” said Brendan Nelson, who teaches English at Monte Vista High in Danville. “Homework that supports what students are doing in the classroom makes their educational experience more rigorous and meaningful.”
Nelson, who sat on the policy revision committee, added that the draft “honors the demands of students’ multifaceted and complex lives and futures.”
“All stakeholders compromised in order to create a document that reflects the importance of high academic standards and students’ need for downtime,” he said.
Chip Shabazian, the lone parent who spoke to the board, asked whether the revised regulation was enforceable or merely discretionary.
“The reason I ask is because I’ve personally tried to enforce the existing policy multiple times at multiple locations over many years,” he said. “I have never received enforcement, and I have sixth-graders that literally spend six and seven hours on their homework without getting to reading. It’s absurd.”
Shabazian recommended the board strengthen enforcement language in the proposed revision. “If there isn’t enforcement of a policy, it’s not going to be worth the paper it’s written on.”
Board chimes in
School board vice president Greg Marvel called the recommended revision “a very good first draft.”
“Overall I think it’s a good step forward,” he said, “as long we implement it in a way that recognizes that every child is unique.”
“It changes how we look at homework,” Hurd noted. “This is saying no child should be spending more than ‘x’ number of hours on their homework.”
Board member Ken Mintz said he wanted to make sure to avoid “overly limiting” students’ ability to work on certain projects at home.
“I wouldn’t want to limit the creativity of our kids also by not having the opportunity at school to do something like a video-based project because we don’t have the resources in the classroom and it is something they would do as part of a ‘homework assignment,'” he explained.
Hurd responded by saying the revised regulation would not “prevent any student from doing more on their own volition, but what it does is protect a family from saying, ‘We’re drowning in this.'”
She also said the committee wanted district officials and school communities to think more about the relationship between doing homework and learning a subject.
“Because our kids have dealt with so much homework for so long, they’ve never really learned how to study,” she said. “And that, we felt, was even more relevant for preparing for colleges. And we wanted to leave room in the homework limits so some of those skills could start.”
District officials plan to bring the final revised administrative regulation to the school board on June 23 for an approval vote, according to Jennison.
After 37 years teaching high school, not much homework is done at home since I found many over time, copying someone’s work.
Best to present thought questions based on classwork which require individualized replies. This in time should direct student’s mind to search his or her thoughts to reply.
In repeatative classes, such as math, certainly need homework.
This is just the Board’s way of preparing us for the change they are hoping to make in the current school calendar. Earlier start date in August, less vacation time for the kids during the holidays… If you value family and vacation time, please voice it by telling the school board to keep the schedule the way it currently stands by emailing them directly!!
If you want to get more involved in redirecting the proposed change to the instructional calendar, please join “The Parents of SRVUSD” on Facebook. We are urging the board to allow public input and interaction before the proposal is taken to the Union and before the board takes a vote.
Link to FB page.
https://m.facebook.com/groups/657025634427383?view=permalink&id=657635544366392&src=email_notif
Just an FYI. There is a posting by “Shelley” and I want to clarify that they are seperate communications from myself, “Shelley B.”
More homework and strict enforcement. We must continue to eliminate all young students discretionary time to be creative.
Check out the draft homework policy on the district website. Nothing will change for AP and Honors classes, meaning that there is no limit to the amount of homework given for these classes. How does this serve to relieve student stress or don’t they believe that these classes cause stress?
Students in the San Ramon Valley now compete with international students for admission to US colleges. We pay taxes to supplement international students’ education. International students have learned to “take the test”- not to reflect on the amazing infrastructure of our Constitution. Our Constitutional infrastructure has been dismissed and deconstructed.
My own children endured homework overkill in the SRVUSD system. (They did their own homework.) They had no time for reflection or informal creativity. I am blessed that they survived the reactionary “me too” thinking of the District.
Students in communities that do not respect education or the notion of an entry level work-ethic will continue to be a different issue. Do you think that parents of students in underperforming areas are debating too much/too little homework? A 14 year old student with a 28 year old mother who did not graduate from high school will need a different kind of strategy. Unfortunately, that may sound discriminatory.
@ Dougherty Valley parent – It is your student’s choice to take Honors/AP classes, and they do not have to. If it is too much for them, just don’t sign the form for your student to take them. These courses are based on college classes and if the student in an AP class gets a 4 on the test, they receive college credit for it, so of course there is going to be a lot of work!!!!
There’s a petition to stop the SRVUSD board from moving forward with the proposed calendar change until more community input can be obtained.
Here’s the link if you want to sign it.
https://www.change.org/p/srvusd-school-board-urge-the-srvusd-to-postpone-adoption-of-the-new-instructional-calendar-for-2016-2017?recruiter=366079180&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink