West Chester School District revamping homework policy

West Chester School District is revamping their homework policy.

"I would say that the homework is sometimes too heavy for a person of that age," said Jonathan Scholl as he watched his daughter's track meet Monday evening. The 7th grader still has homework when she gets home. Her day starts at 6:45 in the morning and ends at 9:30 at night. She often has two hours of homework each night.

"She doesn't get home until 5:30 from sports, there's dinner of course and the chores then needing to do homework," said Scholl.

Deana Steil's son is in 7th grade. Her opinion of his workload is a little different.

"I know this probably isn't the popular opinion but I don't believe my son has enough homework I don't believe he spends enough time studying. Maybe I'm looking for him to be an over achiever I don't know but I want him to be successful," said Steil.

I wanted to talk to parents about homework because the West Chester Area School District is taking a hard look at it. In January officials started drafting a new homework policy. The old guidelines go back 43 years.

They did focus groups, a parent survey, teachers and students everyone got involved. Some of the proposed changes include no homework on weekends for some grades, scheduling tests on different nights and teachers also wouldn't be allowed to have homework due while kids are supposed to be on break. The changes vary for the elementary, middle and high school levels.

"I'll admitt it's high school and most kids don't really want to do the homework," said Cole Boquist. He is a senior at Henderson High and he is helping with the new policy.

"I talked to some kids who were saying that they are doing upwards of five hours of homework a night and one parent was concerned because her child would come home and do homework from the time they got home until the time they went to bed that kind of hit me," said Cole. He's taking AP classes and he's going to Colgate University next year. He knows some classmates are struggling to keep up.

"Sometimes the essays will all pile up towards the end of the semester. I know some kids will say they start getting a little stressed and definitely the number of hours slept each night starts to go down at the end of the quarters." Cole says most students agree with the new plan. They just hope teachers follow it.

"There's definitely some skepticism as to how they're going to be implemented or whether they're going to be affective or not," said Cole.

The School Board will take a final vote on the new homework policy on May 24th. For more information, please click here.