Effective Wednesday, Coppell High School, as well as New Tech High@Coppell and the three middle schools, announced it has pushed back its daily start time.

The decision by Coppell ISD  to change the start time from 8:25 a.m. to 8:40 a.m. at CHS was made in order to alleviate the situation with late arriving school buses. The district is in its first year of using Durham School Services buses.

“We’ve been collecting data over the last two weeks,” CHS Principal Dr. Nicole Jund said. “We knew that we had to go ahead and make the adjustment to the school start time because an average of about 600 to 700 students were not making it to school on time, but they were definitely making it to school safely by about 8:35 and so with that scenario in play, we knew we could move it to 8:40 and we would be good to go.”

Besides changing the start time, changes were also made to passing periods between skinny and blocked classes, cutting down the 12 minute passing periods to nine minutes. In addition, school lunches have also been cut by two minutes, making each lunch 30 minutes.

Even though there is a later start time, there are no changes to drop off times or current bus schedules. Parents will not have to change their current morning schedule due to this change in start time.

“I hope that parents know that we really did spend time considering a lot of other avenues before we came to this conclusion,” Jund said. “Ideally, we would have known that this would have been an issue earlier on, like in the summer, but it’s impossible to mimic a school time bus route in the summer because you don’t have school time traffic. It’s really impossible to anticipate these types of things until you get school in session.”

Overall, the decision that was made was primarily for the benefit of students.

“We are excited to be able to have a normal beginning of the school day for everybody involved including mostly our students but also our staff.” Jund said. “It’s important that the kids are able to be there on time and participate in whatever’s going on instead of coming in late and not being able to be apart of the lesson.”

Looking forward, the school district will continue to monitor events and ensure that transportation issues will move smoothly.

“The good news is we’ll have Durham in place, we’ll have traffic factors in place for next year and so we’ll be able to make good, educated decisions for planning school start times for next year with more information well in advanced,” Jund said.

For more information, visit www.coppellisd.com.