I'd like to know how other parents feel about the District Late Start program this year and the decision by the Board to add another 4 days making a total of 7 Late Starts in 2008-09 school year. A response from school administration (Jennings) to me indicated they are needed to improve the overall development of staff, however because the district cannot afford to pay teachers for a full day of in-service for development, the decision has been made to use student classroom time to accomplish this goal. This equates to a total of 14 hours of lost classroom time for our children (2 days). Development of staff is important, but I do not agree at the sacrifice of our children's time being educated in a classroom. Late Starts are disruptive to parents work schedules, to student/teacher classroom curriculums and they wreak havoc on students who miss 2 hours but must "make up" missed assignments (i.e. Math) during this time on their own time to keep pace with rest of curriculum. The district acknowledges this isn't the ideal situation but they won't lose state $$ for late starts and don't have manage their budget to pay the teachers more money for development. So who wins and who loses? Other districts in this state find time to develop their teachers without in interfering on classroom teaching time for students so why can't District 112? Other districts have even more late starts (Hopkins has 11 this year.) This is an alarming trend that parents need to be in aware of and if you have concerns such as I do, report them here or to District Board.