hello everyone welcome to community conversations since we began community conversations last fall we've had any number of community leaders on our pride cast i've talked with the police chief of belmont richard mc i've spoken with our town administrator and the director of our office of community service i've talked with the head of the belmont farmer's market in the executive director of the habitat wildlife sanctuary and education center one thing we know in belmont however is that we also have in addition to having strong community leadership we have extraordinary students and we want to take an opportunity to tell some of the stories of the students we've keyed up three special community conversations segments for you we're doing one on athletics one on academics and one on community service tonight i delighted to welcome to community conversations ella serrano who and kate debit ellen kate are freshman at belmont high school and they have been active on the discussions regarding what the proper start time for belmont high school is ella kate thank you for taking time away from homework i'm sure  did elementary school in belmont i went to burbank but then from middle school i went to stay the hell a private school in cambridge and now i'm back at high school i went to the wellington elementary school and i went to the really and here are three sports are i play field hockey i do indoor track and cross and yet i was the one with the broken yeah i do club gymnastics outside of school  and so all of your work with the with the school committee with the same start time activity is in addition to your class work in addition your athletics in addition to your your ex did you meet we met this year and we kind of had basically we have all of our classes together which is kind of a really weird coincidence and most every single almost every single one except for language but yeah we just kind of like grew closer athletics and academics in your community service work what do you do with your your free time well i guess we just hang out i mean like the normal teenager softest go to one another's house and we also spend a lot of interesting considering that you're both involved with extra curricular athletics so you know there is a post school day set of activities to take us through a typical day who wants to start first go ok so normally i i go to school and then when i finish school i come home and i try and like eat and like do as much homework as i can before gymnastics and then around four thirty i go to gymnastics until eight thirty and then i come home and try like finish the rest of my homework if i can and then and when you say you go to school you go to school at seven thirty five is when school starts for us and ends at two twenty five and when you get done with gymnastics at the thing i go to school i get out of school i usually have the opportunity to come home before sports but also that depends on the season i'm also throughout the year almost always playing a different sport whichever one it is and so if i have time before the sport that i can go home i eat fruit in a tree so much as i can and then i'll go to practice which can change time sometimes and then i come home finish my homework go to bed and i have to ask you and you can tell me you can refuse to answer but when do you typically finish homework is that over ten thirty at eleven thirty it depends on the load and like how much i get done say during the school day or before gymnastics but it can be as early as a ten hour and like nine thirty or is lee as sometimes like eleven or twelve but like we're just freshmen so it's not that bad yet considering i have a junior brother and she is a junior he is home and is that typical for you yeah sometimes like on a good day i'll finish around six or seven if i have a lot of time to do my work during school and i find that i actually get a lot of my homework done during school because i'm kind of in that mindset the school mindset which is kind of like get work done and do what you can so you're on a good day six or seven on a bad day for a local oven so there are days that you start  the what your favorite topic or your favorite subject in school is their favorite one and in your freshman year well i say my favorite subject this year is geometry mostly because of my actually enjoy writing like whether it's poems or even an essay i don't mind which is kind of rare because most people are like oh and i say but i actually don't mind it i enjoy writing so let's change  s a little bit because we're we're here to talk about the same start time activities that the two of you have been leading over the last several months or six months perhaps  to give us a brief background where what can you tell us about the background to this issue so that our position no not particularly your position but why why is there an issue to take a position on i for the other side for the later start and that i think this is something that's recently like come about and that people have been hearing about every now and then and so we heard about it because a student was telling us to sign the petition for later start and we just kind of thought like like because a lot of people they're like oh yeah sure i'll sign it like who i get to wake up at you know eight o'clock and go to school later but like we kind of like took like took a step back and kind of looked at it like and thought about it and we  talked to each other like like why would we want to start school later and then oh when when you say that you talked about it you know you're sitting next to each other in class so i'm your friends yeah you were friends before the  issue and you began working on this together for a while i thought i was the only one that thought it was like kind of a bad idea to have some consequences but we started talking about it and we realized that we kind of shared a lot of views and at the end of our conversation we're kind of thinking like we should do something about this and then we actually ended up pursuing our what we had thought of and then it turned out yeah and like when we were telling other students of like the possible  the negative outcomes or the possible impact that it would have the later start they started they like it made them like think they're like oh yeah like i see like maybe like i don't want that like your words in your mouth but there was an assumption that well teenage kids are high school kids most always want to sleep in because on saturdays they are for sleeping until noon and then you started to find that maybe that assumption didn't hold true necessary i feel like the assumption was that like everybody was for it that it was a very like that people were very those very kind of just a one sided thing that it was just like people agreed with it and they would like wanted to pursue it but it didn't really occur to much people like maybe the other side if there was in fact another side so tell me kate let me come to over you for a minute when you first decided that this was something where there was another side to the issue where what was the first step i how do you get started to there is this is something that this new decision is going to be made and everybody is for it that's what i've heard you guys saying and you wanted to present a contrary view oh what's the first step what do you do i think the sorry i'm so the baffled ok i think the first thing that i started doing was bringing it up to friends and people that i associate with associate with during my day so i bring it up to them and i tell them my kind of views on it and the issues that i have with it and i noticed that a lot of the people that i address started to agree with me and started to so yeah i understand that that makes a lot of sense and then after that it kind of shifted to social media and trying to see if we could like reach out to other people who possibly agreed with us and i think from there it really took off but one of the impressive things i don't want you guys to get because here one of the impressive things about what you've been able to do with the school committee is not only to express an opinion but you have real research academic research that supports the opinions that you've been expressing is that accurate or my overs it you'd like to think it was and yet you where did you where did you start doing your research is that you go to the library is it internet research it's mostly surfing the web these days because there are a lot of articles out there but mostly like our from our articles like it was kind of like i was like kind of like inspired i guess you could say by it like my dad because he's a scientist and i tend of like taking a step back to look at all of the data and not to make like quick  the sleep article i think i thought sure and we found a lot of data that was actually contrary to the data from the other side we found that some studies show  that after putting a later start time and said there was no change in mental health or g p a which was actually really great for argument and kind of showed that we need to see like all of the sides and instead of just jumping to the forewarned that they we're going to be asked to do this i'd like one of you to take the pro position because i would guess that most of our viewers are aware of the issue but not familiar with it so i'd like one of you to take the pro position on why we should start later and then we'll let the other one answer with the  and understand and have you have you chosen who wants to do which side yeah i'm going to be doing the proposition ok can i ask you to look at the look at the camera and tell the folks  belmont why there should be a delay in the start it's ok so basically one of the main arguments is that students are not getting the sleep that they should be through studies and research and that having more sleep as a teenager is has a lot of health benefits and in addition to this studies show that students sleep fast especially th school school years from eleven pm to eight am and pushing back the start time would really suit the students needs and have them getting more sleep better sleep which the ultimate goal is to give well kind of the conversation that we believe is that starting if you start school later it's kind of like a chain effect that you start school later then you'll end school later and then you'll get home later and then you'll start your homework later and like exciter or like there has to be give somewhere so either your whole day will shift or they were trying to shorten the school day and shortening the school day they obviously can't be classed as though although i wish they could take away some they they would it was probably the most i could result in furies i'm not saying that it will definitely like take away freezer and be a longer day but its possibilities like that they can choose from and that ultimately if you're going to bed later yeah sure you're sleeping in later but a lot of these a lot of all of this about starting school later is very like new to multiple towns and so there hasn't been many like long term as we haven't seen the long term outcomes necessarily and so the concept of things that if you start school later that you will just get back get used to that and that will become your routine and it won't seem as beneficial anymore because it's just like the like now like that's become like the way it is and you don't just kind of think that you you do mean is there a weakness in that argument one one strength i think of knowing an issue is knowing the weaknesses or your own argument is there and i'm not asking you  to believe there but is there weakness in what you believe i think that our biggest weakness is that there are studies that show that students get their best sleep from eleven pm to eight am i think that's really the strongest point going against us because we can argue that pushing back the start time of school won't really increase or sleep but if you're hours are pushed back there could be an increase of your health because that's the key hours that you're getting antsy i also think that there's not like there's not enough to like a bunch of data so like neither side really knows so it's kind of like inconclusive  to know but i would like to change directions for a minute because one of the things of having to freshman and i have to admit i don't you're young yet to young people involved is that you have ways of doing social organizing and outreach that are completely foreign to you people m t and one thing i'd like to do is to ask our folks here at the media center to put up a poster that kate and so just this was a poster not a flyer yeah this is the poster that we brought to the school committee meeting as kind of like a visual and i would like to let's not look at the later started as a band aid let's find real solutions we'll come back and one is hash tag late start when states ok now i understand that as a high school student in to many of our viewers  this is this is second nature but to people my age working with hashtags new and interesting when you organize on an issue such as that tell me what's the kind of represents like for example hashtags can take off as in people start using them usually to bring light to an issue so by using the hash tags we're kind of saying like these are issues that we want you to consider we want you to use then for example if somebody wanted to share our views if for some reason they felt inclined to they could use those hashtags can you track a h chinese class we were we made a video and we were like trying to like get out the word issue we often ran into and which is something we ran into here is that just placing out the whole entirely and having them type it is very like is very tasking and so with that you can either scan it with an app on your phone or we discovered that you can scan on staff chat if you like take a picture of it and then it'll take you to our petition website in and it will create an original q r code and the thing with q r codes is that they're like black squares kind of that like there because that you can make so many different patterns with it and that pattern is unique to your website that you want to take take you to and how did you know that and how did you know how to do that well again when i was trying to get out the word my my dad kind of suggested like i don't know what it was at first so i'm not sure how it was used before but it's just kind of like a quick way to like take you right to the site instead of having to and you mentioned the change that org petition can you explain to us what the change that org petition was  basically as a way to kind of show that we do have support on our stance and that our stance is one that deserves to be recognized we created a petition that people can sign  online to agree with us and we ended up with over one hundred signatures which was really great for us in our human and i think it really got the school committees that tension so i guess it was also kind of a way to for people to take us more of would literally in like we're not just you know people who are like we take this very serious and i'd like to correct you for just a minute because my understanding about can you give us thirty seconds well i definitely relate to that being that my gymnastics club it starts at four and it's on the high school schedule so if high school were to shift later and say and their day at four are maybe around five i'm not sure what time would be but that would definitely affect me making it to him asked to do that it's ok let's go to the second one here yes freeze are an important part of high school culture and really help students to be productive and you used the term freeze before so first tell us all what a free is so freeze or a free period is a span of twenty minutes that you can have off from your class you can have more than one at a time and basically you can hang out on the school wherever you want and people often use it a time to get work done whether it's their homework or studying for a test and free stuff in a really critical period of time for me and others as well to kind of one relax if the day stressful to kind of take a breather and do you mind and also get work done so you have a bit busy schedule after school if you do your work or you're studying kind of distress for the rest of the day ok and i want to go to one more i think we have two more but we're running a little short on time here let's go to the next one as well that talks about extracurriculars again if we can go to one more yes from victoria ficci i don't know if i'm pronouncing that name the parents need to take away children so i try to ensure a good night's sleep but the important part of this if they start an hour later they will only get to bed an hour later that's part of your argument right that this students are just their time their own personal time lines to match what's going on what the start time is  my reaction was that i was impressed because it shows that the two of you are now out there simply making stuff up that there are people out there who believe what you believe and that the things that you argue are are grounded in real life to real people yeah you agree with that yeah is that one of the purposes of the change dot org yeah i think we just wanted to again show how other people relate with our issues a lot and there are also other things that you haven't spoken to here today like for example transportation could be a serious issue if the times were to change i mean there are adults who have strict hours and also traffic is a big issue and start times with the middle and elementary school on how they would clash well what i would like to  students you just went to the high schools so hopefully the kids that are in the tenor the burbank or the wellington will relate to to you if you had something to say to a chinese student what would that be  hat the camera and tell us well i would say if you're passionate about selling don't be afraid to like try and pursue it because we just we just started out talking about it and then it became we made a petition and then we got we were able to present it to the school committee and we were able to be there and see them discussing about this topic and seeing what impact we had on their discussion that they weren't just dismissing what we said that they actually listened to us and took our diaz and  are leaders in community service here in belmont i would like to thank ellen cade for joining us on community conversations i would like to thank you the viewers for watching us tonight you should look for our other two segments of the focus on students for the community conversations telecast we have one on have what it's one on academics in addition to this looking at community service in addition you can listen to the regular community conversations podcast which is taped every other week and you can find them on the b m c podcast network on the media dot org website thank you for joining us tonight i'm your community conversations host roger colden thanks again