In the 2024-2025 school year Omaha Public schools introduced late starts, this means of specific days school will start two hours later than normal.  The extra two hours of sleep are not worth the hassle for students and their families.

Students who do not get bussed to school struggle to get to school on time on late start days.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 66.1% of Americans have to work before 9 a.m. With 71.4 having to be at work before 11 a.m.  7:40 a.m. and elementary school students by 8:50 a.m.

With these times, most parents can get their child to school on time before they have to be at work. Now with the late start, middle school and high schools start at 9:40 a.m. and elementary school starts at 10:50 a.m.  

This leads to parents scrambling to get their children to school on days with late starts.  

“Late starts are very inconvenient for working families” said Leita Barnes a mother of OPS students of all levels.  

 While some may argue high school students have their license and can take themselves and younger siblings to school, this is false.  

Omaha North only sold 71 parking passes this year meaning only 71 students out of 1,796 student Omaha North take themselves to school.  

Brooke McDaniel, 12, is one of the few students that drives to school. This makes getting to school a lot easier for her family.  

 According to the Washington Post in 2021, fewer than 40% of 16–19-year-olds had their license. Compared to 75.1% of 16-19′ s having their license in 2015. The amount of young people with their license is rapidly declining.  

In a time of less student drivers, OPS cannot become reliant on student drivers. Besides just transportation some, parents believe the late start is a nonsense day, and they are not wrong. 

 “It seems a little silly to send my elementary school kids to school at 10:50 a.m. when they go to lunch and recess at 11:00 a.m., and my high school kids are only in class for an hour at most, nothing is getting done in that time,” said Barnes 

Teachers try their best to teach every day but only having an hour-long class, with 4 students out of 20 showing up, makes it hard to teach. On top of that, OPS runs a block schedule meaning, each class is every other day. Teachers struggle to keep their students at the same pace during late start days. One class getting behind schedule can completely disrupt a teacher’s schedule.  

“I have to cram a lot more information into a shorter amount of time so my classes that had less time due to late start ends up having a lot more homework, but that is because I teach AP for other classes it would be harder to keep them on track,” said Shelia Connor a English teacher at Omaha North high school. 

This schedule also affects students. Cara Travis, 11, no longer goes to school on late start days because it is a “free day” 

“On the first late start day my mom took me to school by 8:45 because she must be at work by 9 a.m., so I sat in the library for an hour doing homework, and then when I went to all of my classes they just told us to make up work because there is not enough time to get stuff done,” said Travis.  

 A school day is seven hours and twenty-five minutes and there are four two-hour late starts throughout the school year. All the late starts added together equal eight hours or one school day.  

“I do not like late starts, I get to school at 10:45 and go to lunch in 30 minutes. If I had first lunch, I would be mad because why am I eating breakfast, “said Mcdaniel.  

This means that Omaha Public Schools could give one extra teacher workday like in the past. In the 2022-2023 school year, there were seven teacher workdays where the day off was not given for conferences, a holiday, or a Voting Day. While in the 2024-2025 school year there are only six teacher workdays.  

This one-day missing is broken up into four late start days. In the past years there were just seven workdays and no late starts.  

When OPS implemented late starts, they did not take into consideration how working families must adapt to the time. It would be in OPS’s best interest to revert to 7 teacher workdays instead of late starts.