The dismissal bell for all North Little Rock School District elementary schools will be 10 minutes earlier beginning after the Labor Day holiday, the district's School Board decided Tuesday.
The elementary schools will start at 7:50 a.m., just as they do currently. The new dismissal time will be 2:40 p.m., as opposed to the current 2:50 p.m.
Starting and dismissal times for North Little Rock High School also will be changing slightly after Labor Day -- five minutes later in the morning, 8:25 a.m., and five minutes later in the afternoon, 3:40 p.m.
The School Board approved the changes at a special meeting Tuesday.
The changes are meant to give district school bus drivers a larger window of time -- from 25 minutes to 35 minutes -- to transport elementary pupils home to their neighborhoods and then reach North Little Rock Middle School before that school dismisses pupils at 3:15 p.m.
In the early days of this school year, the more than 20 buses going to the middle school are getting caught up in traffic and are delayed in getting to the pick-up points on the middle school campus.
The North Little Rock district's school bus system has been restructured since last year, from a system in which a driver would typically have two bus runs in the morning and two again in the afternoon, to a three-run system.
As a result, most of the district's bus drivers now transport elementary pupils to school, then middle school pupils and then do a high school run.
The new system is intended to be more efficient, cut costs and offset a chronic shortage of drivers, Superintendent Bobby Acklin has said.
The school time changes will be the second modification in the elementary school schedule since last school year.
The North Little Rock School Board voted in April to make the school day 20 minutes longer for elementary pupils in this new school year as a way to preserve instructional time while accommodating 40 minutes of recess time as required by Act 641 of 2019.
Because of the board vote Tuesday, the elementary day will be 10 minutes longer than it was last year.
Lori Smith, the director's director of elementary education, told the board that the 10-minute extension of the day is workable and satisfactory.
Metro on 08/22/2019