cutting class

“That’s the key for the parents and the kids to come back to school because otherwise we may start getting lots of cutting class and not coming back.”

Never mind that the teenager is friendless, cutting class and has taken to self-harm; Kate and Peter agree that a change of scenery will restore the cheerful child they raised.

Shifting school starts is so powerful that Teny Shapiro, an economics professor at Santa Clara University, has found beginning school an hour later is the functional equivalent of cutting class size by a third.

She described herself as the kind of girl who “spent the entire time cutting class, reading novels and smoking in the parking lot.”

Schools are already spending big chunks of their approximately $190 billion in pandemic relief money on a range of strategies from after-school programs to cutting class size.