Before they consider making changes to the way school is held in Oxford, the district is looking for community feedback through the annual district wide survey. The district takes information from the survey to learn about what it does well and what it can improve on.

“It’s a good way for us to get information from our parents and community,” Superintendent Tim Throne said.

This year, Oxford Schools are asking for feedback on two specific topics along with the usual questions of the accessibility and helpfulness when it comes to things like the central office staff. The community will be asked about their opinion on the possibility of moving to a balanced calendar and later start times for the post-elementary schools.

“We don’t want to go down and invest a lot of time and energy figuring out a lot of this stuff if our community is 99 percent saying, ‘Are you guys crazy? We don’t want our schools to do this,’” Throne said.

Adopting a balanced calendar would result in students having a shorter summer break, but more breaks throughout the school year.

“A balanced calendar tries to balance (the year) out so that maybe you start the (school) year in August and get out later in June,” Throne said.”You still have a summer break, but instead of it being 12 weeks long, maybe it’s six or seven weeks long. So what you do is you spread out that time. You’re not going long periods throughout the school year without any breaks.”

As for start times, the schools are considering giving middle and high school students a little more time to sleep in the morning.

“Almost all the research that we’ve read out there says elementary students are up and they’re ready to go early in the morning and adolescents take longer for their body to wake up,” Throne said. “So, does our community agree with that and say maybe elementary should be starting first?”

Both of these would be big changes for the district, and Throne said he wants the pulse of the community before moving forward with or abandoning either idea.

“If our parents, our community is against it, we don’t want to invest a lot of resources into it right now,” he said.

The district is hoping at least a third of parents and the community will share their thoughts. “For me personally, I think if we were able to get more than 33 percent of our parents and community to fill this out, I’d love it,” Throne said.

Throne added that these surveys help the district do its job, which ultimately affects all of the students and parents.

“If they want to make sure their voice is heard on various topics, whether it’s start times or balanced calendars or really any other topic, this is a really good way for them to put their voice out there and let us know what they’re thinking,” he said.

The survey can be accessed here and will be open through March 15. School-centered building surveys will be sent out later in the spring.