North Judson-San Pierre students may soon get one night a week off from extracurricular activities.
Superintendent Dr. Annette Zupin told the school board last week that starting next school year, she would like to designate Wednesday nights as “family nights,” “Which means that no games are scheduled or extracurricular after 5:30,” she explained, “and if you notice, our Wednesday schedule is light when it comes to athletics. That’s because all of the schools around here have it, and so that gives us a light schedule. The concept is that every family should have one night when they’re not running all over the place.”
Board members seemed to be in favor of the change, noting that a similar policy had been in place decades ago.
Zupin said a couple of details would still have to be worked out, such as whether the schools’ athletic facilities could still be rented to outside organizations on Wednesday nights. “We have a lot of, I would call it, traveling teams and AAU teams that practice after hours here,” she said. “They fill out the request forms. But I’m not for sure we should allow that on Wednesday nights because those are our students and it defeats the purpose.” Board members seemed split on that issue but generally agreed that 5:30 was a good cut-off time for extracurricular events.
Zupin said she’d continue to research what other schools do, and the school board is expected to vote on an official policy in the next couple months. But she pointed out that it would take a while for the “family night” policy to take full effect, since the athletic department schedules games years in advance.
