SAIL Families Ask CMS Board to Undo the 9:15 Start

Fifteen of the 33 people who spoke at Tuesday's Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education meeting came about one thing: the hour their school day starts.

Beginning in 2027-28, South Academy of International Languages, the district's K-8 language-immersion magnet known as SAIL, and Sedgefield Middle School are to move to a 9:15 a.m. start. SAIL now opens at 8:15 and dismisses at 3:15. CMS Transportation announced the change at the board's Sept. 22 meeting, in a presentation it described as informational and requiring no board action. The board never voted on it.

Parents, students, a SAIL alumnus and a Sedgefield teaching assistant asked the board to reverse it anyway, and several came with the same alternative: keep the bell where it is, and put magnet riders on express or consolidated bus stops instead of door-to-door routes.

"I understand that CMS has a driver shortage and that needs to be addressed," said Luka, a junior at Ballantyne Ridge High School who went to SAIL from kindergarten through eighth grade. "However, I'm asking you not to fix it by breaking something that you can't replace."

Why a bell time

The case for the change was made Sept. 22, the same night the board fired Superintendent Crystal Hill. Tim Ivey, the district's chief operations officer, told the board CMS runs 750 buses, carries more than 105,000 assigned riders and serves nearly 25,000 stops. Over the past decade, he said, the number of schools rose from 168 to 184 while the bus driver workforce fell from 1,135 to 643, and school choice programs, which bring riders from across the county, grew from about a quarter of schools to nearly 39 percent. Afternoon on-time arrival fell from 86 percent to 71 percent in the first two weeks of this school year.

Nicole Portee, the interim chief operations officer, said bell times are "one of the strongest levers available to improve transportation efficiency." CMS runs a nine-tier bell schedule between 7:15 and 9:15 a.m., she said, and the 7:15 tier alone takes about 612 buses. Moving schools out of the most crowded tiers lets each bus serve more schools without adding drivers. Ivey said the changes "are for the 27-28 school year." Portee said families at the affected schools would be notified the next morning.

Neither Ivey nor Portee named the schools on tape. A SAIL parent who wrote to The Charlotte Mercury on Oct. 8 said families were told their hours would become 9:15 to 4:15, after they had already made their magnet lottery selections.

What SAIL families said

SAIL teaches French, Chinese, German and Japanese by immersion, starting in kindergarten. Parents said that is what makes the school hard to refill. Students who enter after kindergarten must pass a language test, so a seat vacated in the elementary grades can sit empty.

Louisa Kleto, whose two children take Japanese, said the other languages have two classes per grade and Japanese has one. "The surveys have told us that almost half of the students in our school will consider leaving SAIL if the bell change goes through," she said. The other programs might combine classes until a new kindergarten class arrives, she said, "but the Japanese program isn't able to do so." A parent of three in the German program, who did not give her name at the podium, put the parents' own poll at about 50 percent of families, and said that if 400 of SAIL's 800 elementary students left, about a third of the whole school's 1,200 seats would sit empty.

Those are the parents' numbers.

Liliana Ramos, the mother of a French-immersion student, said she drives 55 minutes to SAIL each morning. "Most of the parents start work between 8 or 9," she said. "Our school starts at 8:15 but the doors opens around 7:45." With a 9:15 bell, she said, her choices would be to arrive at work an hour late, "which is unacceptable and I'm gonna be fired," pay for a before-school program she cannot afford as a single mother, or move her son to his home school, "which doesn't have any immersion program."

Cameron, a seventh grader who has studied Japanese for eight years, said his father works third shift and his mother has to be at work around the time the later bus would arrive. "This means that I would probably have to change schools," he said. "My new school wouldn't offer the same language classes, and missing my last year of Japanese could put me too far behind to continue in high school."

Tate, a sixth grader in the Chinese program, told the board he will miss Halloween this year because he leaves Oct. 31 with 12 classmates for a two-week exchange trip to Baoding, China. "I think I can skip out on a few candies for this," he said. "Some of my friends have already told me that they will have to leave the school if the schedule is changed because their parents have to go to work."

The bus that circled the school

Jocelyn Reed, a parent of four CMS students, brought a map of her children's bus route. For 10 years, she said, families in her neighborhood gave up home stops for one consolidated stop, and it worked. This year the bus "took an hour and 20 minutes to get here, 15-minute drive from the school," she said. It left school, drove across the street for its first stop, spent 40 minutes circling the school inside CMS's own no-transportation zone, and passed her stop to make home stops before coming back.

Reed said more than 300 people met with CMS Transportation and some board members at SAIL on Monday night, the night before the board meeting, and that her stop was better prioritized the next day: the bus arrived 30 minutes faster, though only two stops ahead of hers were permanently removed. She asked the board for three things: audit inefficient routes and report the findings publicly, overturn the bell change, and work with SAIL families on any further changes "rather than making decisions for us."

Ellen Hefner, a parent in the German program, asked why the board was not requiring magnet students to use "logical grouped bus stops like consolidated, express and shuttle stops beginning in August 2027." The same German-program parent said Kevin DeVore, who she said presented for CMS Transportation at Monday's meeting, told it that returning to the express-stop system used before 2016 would cut the buses SAIL needs in half, from 24 to 12. CMS has not posted that presentation on the board's meeting site.

Marguerite Carson, the parent of twin first graders in the Chinese program, thanked the board members who came Monday and put it as a question of root cause. "There have been eight years of consistent bus driver shortages," she said. "And as far as I'm aware to date, nothing has been proposed to say that this will be addressed."

Sedgefield's turn

Sedgefield Middle is on the same list. Reid, a seventh grader there, said the school's start time "was recently changed to 9:15 from the original 7:15" for 2027-28, and that parents who now drop off and get to work on time "won't arrive at work until 10 or 10:30."

Sheryl Roberts, a teaching assistant at Sedgefield, read the board the reason the Sept. 22 presentation gave: "By adjusting the following schools, CMS can effectively level bell tiers and align program offerings to improve overall operational efficiency and the student experience." She said it was vague. "Did anyone from transportation ask Sedgefield students if they thought it would improve their experience?" she asked. "Where is the actual data and evidence that changing the bell schedule would benefit the students, staff, and families?"

The 9:15 slot, she said, already has one of the highest demands for bus routes in the district's own presentation, and she asked whether 7:45 or 8 o'clock had been considered. The current schedule lets staff take classes or second jobs after school and lets students get tutoring, she said. "When Sedgefield started at 9:15, we were a low-performing school. With the current bell schedule, we are increasing proficiency as a C school, quickly approaching a B."

What the board said

The board took no action on bell times Tuesday; none was on the agenda. In board reports, Vice Chair Liz Monterrey Duvall spoke to the SAIL families directly. "I hear you, I understand your concerns," she said. "I've been trying to reach out to you individually and I'll continue to advocate on your behalf."

Board member Lenora Shipp said she was at Monday's meeting at SAIL. "I'm here now, still committed to listening, learning, and leaning in." Board member Shamaiye Haynes told the SAIL parents she was proud of them, and said she had done the same kind of advocacy for 10 years, unpaid.

Acting Superintendent Melissa Balknight, in her report, said the turnout showed parents are happy with what is going on at their school. She did not address the bell change.

Steve Oreskovic, who asked the board to restore a teacher advisory council's original bylaws, put the ask as a count. "Board Member London and four more," he said, "please do not allow this to happen."

What the board can do about a transportation decision it did not make is not something anyone at the dais answered Tuesday.