DOUGLAS COUNTY, Colo. — Prior to the start of the 2026-2027 school year, Douglas County Schools implemented Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) for teachers at all of the schools in the district.
This created a 45-minute delayed start on Fridays for students so teachers could partake in PLCs.
"I was ecstatic, and I know a lot of my colleagues were also ecstatic," said Lucy Squire, president of the Douglas County Federation, the teachers union at DougCo schools. "The issue that we've had for a while, elementary versus secondary, is the amount of planning time we're given."
Squire has been a teacher in the district for more than two decades.
She explained to Denver7's Douglas County Reporter Tyler Melito how the PLCs work.
"On these Friday mornings, I am meeting with my teammate, and then we have someone from our professional or our personalized learning team," Squire explained. "We have an additional person from our big school support team coming into every team, and so we are sitting, we are creating either a math-specific plan or a reading-specific plan for the unit that we're working on," she said. "We're coming up with the standard that we're covering based on what we've taught, the outcomes we're looking for, what our success criteria is, so percentage, how, like how, many kids are we looking for to show mastery? What are we going to do for the kids who don't show that mastery? So what are our next steps to support their learning? What are we going to do to extend the kids who do show mastery, but we have kids who are still working on it, and then just going from there."
Squire added that when they meet the following week, she and her fellow teachers go over what worked, what didn't work and how they can make the learning experience better for students.
"It is definitely not a time to catch up on work. It's not a time to just sit and chat as much as we would like to. It really is creating these plans, what we're looking for in our instruction," Squire said.
Squire says parents she has spoken with have embraced the PLCs and the delayed starts that come with them, which means a lot.
"Having this time before school every week to come as a team, and then being able to utilize our additional planning times during the week, where we can still get together to plan our content, to still look at the data if we need to, to do all of the other things that we do without eating into this PLC time is so valuable," Squire said.
Parents like Tracy Wojtalewicz voiced their support for the delayed starts.
"I was fine with it," Wojtalewicz said. "My daughter looks forward to Fridays because she gets to sleep in. It's a slower-paced morning."
Wojtalewicz currently has one student enrolled in DCSD, but she has had three kids go through the district over the years.
She said she recognizes other people's frustrations with the delayed starts, having experienced difficulty working to ensure all her kids get to school on time.
"My husband and I struggled with that for years," Wojtalewicz explained. "Where he would have to start a little later, or we would find carpool. We had at one point we had hired a high school student to drop off one child while I took one and he took one."
But there are some detractors to the delayed starts too. Nicole Maxson started a petition urging DCSD to end the delayed starts.
"It's having a major negative impact on families like mine that have working parents," Maxson said. "Unfortunately for me and my husband, we both work. My husband's got a typical nine-to-five, and my schedule varies because I'm an emergency room nurse; my license has to be in the building for them to be able to treat clients. And if I can't be there, they can't work. And so, starting my students, my kids now start after 9 a.m., and that's impacting a lot of, not just parents but even local businesses."
Maxson says she supports the teachers having the PLC time, but wishes the district did a better job communicating about it.
"They sent out a survey right before Thanksgiving break. It closed in a month, and it was one communication," Maxson said. "I'm not an uninvolved parent. I volunteer for my kids' classrooms. I'm at all of the fun runs and all the events. I am invested in my students and my children and my kids and in the school, and I didn't actually hear about the delayed start until the welcome back email in like late July, early August."
Maxson sent Denver7 her email conversations with the district. Assistant Secretary to the Board of Education Shauna Manitoken told Maxson that 2,717 families and staff responded to the survey that asked about adding PLCs, and that it was only to elementary school and middle school families and staff.
For context, state data shows there are about 26,000 students enrolled in DCSD elementary schools and another 14,000 enrolled in district middle schools.
Wojtalewicz says while she saw the surveys, she isn't surprised that it may have gotten buried in people's inboxes.
"If I remember correctly, it wasn't super clear in the title of the email what it was for," Wojtalewicz said. "It just said something to the effect of Douglas County delayed start survey or something like that. We get surveys a lot on the calendar, and you know which calendar would you prefer, things like that. So they easily get lost, but we did get it, and I filled it out, and then I got it a second time."
Maxson shared that she hopes the district and the school board will reconsider.
"My next step would be to be able to get this back onto the school boards, like a meeting, to get parents to be able to come, and then to make sure that those parents know that this is happening," Maxson said.
Tahnee Penta is a single mom with three daughters in DougCo Schools. She says she supports the teachers having this dedicated time too, but says the challenge of finding child care is very prevalent.
"Douglas County is absolutely beautiful, but it is usually a dual-income community; two parents are usually working. I know a couple of my mom friends have had to take, like, personal time in the morning and adjust their entire schedule for these Fridays," Penta says.
DCSD does offer childcare through its Before and After School Education (BASE) program for elementary school students. There is no childcare offered through the program for middle school students. It costs about $16 per day, depending on the program, just for before-school care.
Denver 7 reached out to DCSD requesting an interview about the PLCs, and a spokesperson said they did not have a comment.
