Manhattan Beach Unified School District Superintendent Dr. Michael Matthews holds stress workshop

By Michael Beeli

Staff Writer

Manhattan Beach Unified School District Superintendent Dr. Michael Matthews held a stress relief workshop on Nov. 18 in the MCHS small theater and library to discuss potential ways to decrease strains placed on students with rigorous academic schedules.

The workshop began at 5 p.m. and after a presentation on stress relief, the audience was moved to the library where various MBUSD staff held small workshops, where attendees discussed possible solutions to five different topics that according to Matthews are most critical to student stress relief.

“The five topics we want to focus on primarily on are implementing best practices for student loan balancing, developing connected and balanced students, ensuring that student classes are relevant and engaging, exploring alternate schedules, and evaluating grading practices” Matthews said. “We held workshops for these five because they’re the most important.”

Student loan balancing refers to the distribution of homework, tests and projects among students. Matthews said that student loads are overwhelming due to coinciding due dates of projects, exams and homework between multiple AP classes that students often take at the same time. One of the measures Matthews proposed to promote student loan balancing was to ensure students don’t overextend themselves throughout the year.

“If you’re taking three AP classes, that’s almost the equivalent of a full time college load in high school,” Matthews said. “If we don’t put a limit on the number of AP classes students can take a year, who will?”

In addition to possibly reducing the number of AP classes students can take, Matthews also considered altering district-wide homework policies. Some proposals include requiring homework to be assigned in class, rather than e-mailed later in the day and limiting the amount of homework students can receive.

“According to a number of studies, more than two hours of homework in High School is considered ineffective,” Matthews said. “After two hours the quality and impact of the time spent on additional work has been shown to decrease dramatically. The amount is even less for Middle School Students. They shouldn’t be spending more than an hour and a half a day.

Matthews’s plan to develop connected and balanced students focuses on teaching mindfulness to students through the district’s MindUP program and implementing the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development Whole Child Approach.

“There’s a number of tenets to this process,” Matthews said. “Every child has to be healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. 62% of 11th graders say it is pretty much or very much true that there is a teacher or adult who cares about them, so we need our students to be more connected to faculty members. “We’ve been looking into personalized learning activities, effective utilization of office hours, use of faculty as club advisors and coaches, and life skills teaching in the classroom as possible solutions.”

The California Healthy Kids Survey revealed that 48% of ninth graders and 40% of eleventh graders are putting in significant effort because they are interested in their work, while just 36% of ninth and eleventh graders report definitively making a difference at their respective schools. As a result, Matthews proposed methods to help make Student Classes Relevant and Engaging.

“We want our students to explore electives, activities, and courses that interest them,” Matthews said. “Classroom instruction should as relevant as possible to the lives of students. We’ve also looked into having at least one class/activity daily that each student is passionate about, but having it every class would be best”

Master schedule issues are also a significant source of stress among students. Some students want to take electives that would go past a six period day. Additionally, 8 a.m. start has been commonly acknowledged as too early for Teens, yet 30% of all Costa students take a zero period at 7 a.m. Reliance on summer school has significantly increased as well. According to an MBX summer school survey, 37% of students enroll in summer school to make room electives, 27% enroll to ease their academic course during the school year, and 8% of students sign up in order to avoid having to take a zero period.

“In terms of improving schedules for students, there is a number of options,” Matthews said. “There is the block schedule option, similar to what Redondo Union High School does, Collaboration Wednesdays, with the beginning of Office Hours have been helpful, Evening Classes are a possibility, or even rescheduling so that there could be a late start every day of the year are all ways we can make student schedules work better for them”