Reconfiguring Pickup Time at John Marshall
The administration of the John M. Marshall Elementary School is changing the way its students in grades two to five will be dismissed at the end of the school day.
In response to concerns that the system was too time-consuming, too chaotic for the kids, and too much of a burden on teachers, Beth Doyle, the principal, and Dennis Sullivan, the assistant principal, devised a plan they unveiled during Tuesday’s meeting of the East Hampton School Board. It will be implemented beginning on the first day of school, Sept. 8.
Ms. Doyle said Mr. Sullivan worked with fire department and police officials in the village and the town to plan new traffic patterns aimed at reorganizing dismissal — and, as a side effect, morning drop-off as well.
“Our proposed plan will really increase access and efficiency,” Ms. Doyle said. “What it looks like from the outside, if you’re picking up a student, is that it’s working. Behind the scenes, it’s really not.”
She said the current dismissal system involved corralling students into the gym while they waited sometimes up to 30 minutes for buses and parent pickups, supervised by staff members who are contractually bound to have a 10-minute dismissal duty but who were frequently staying much longer than that. Ms. Doyle called the old system appropriate for a school with fewer students.
“Now that we’ve grown tremendously, it doesn’t work anymore,” Ms. Doyle said. “It’s unsafe, it’s inefficient, and it’s extending [staff members] beyond their contractual day. Our proposed plan will address all three issues.”
Afternoon dismissal and morning drop-off for students in kindergarten and first grade will remain the same. The procession of buses will also remain the same at the front of the school. Staff members will be equipped with radios to make the process smooth.
In the new system, Ms. Doyle said, essentially all individual drop-offs that were occurring in the front of the school will now happen at the back of the school.
All parents picking up students in grades two to five will enter the school grounds through the gate on Church Street, which opens to a two-lane road around the back of the school. Two segments of that back road will be delineated: an immediate section for grades four and five, and, around the corner of the school past the multipurpose room, another section for grades two and three. Cars will be asked to pull up on the left side of the road, meaning the children won’t have to cross the road to get picked up. Cars will then proceed around the back of the school and out toward Gingerbread Lane. For students with siblings, the older sibling will move to the area where the younger sibling is being picked up.
Morning drop-off for grades two to five will be similar, with parents entering on Church Street, but all students will enter the gym and wait there, supervised by teachers, until it is time to go to class.
The gate on Church Lane will be opened around 2:30 p.m., Mr. Sullivan said, which prompted questions.
“What happens if there is a big line and you’re going to have backup on Church Lane?” Liz Pucci, a school board member, asked.
Ms. Doyle responded that it wouldn’t be too much of a backup. “We’ve counted the cars. It may be 10 minutes,” she said.
Jackie Lowey, another school board member, asked for a system for collecting parent and community comment. “This needs to be couched as a pilot test, and we employ a feedback loop to get some real, empirical information on this,” she said. “To keep in touch. How’s it working? What’s the feedback? I’m guessing the people on Church Street are not going to be very happy. We’re saying we’re trying this because we think it’s a solution and it’s promising.”
Christina DeSanti, the vice president of the school board, said that “on paper” it looked like a good solution. “You’re taking the major bottleneck that was in one spot and making it a shorter bottleneck in two spots,” she said.
Joseph Lipani, supervisor of the district’s transportation department, said he is on board with the reconfiguration. “Everything is worth the effort,” he said.