Death knell for the Winnipeg school bells

The official sound of summer break is being silenced in city schools.

Some Manitoba students are marking the end of the 2022-23 academic year without a final bell as silent school transitions grow in popularity.

Instead of loud rings and buzzers, more and more building managers are relying on teachers and students to defer to classroom clocks and make scheduling changes accordingly.

“Some administrators find that turning bells off helps maintain the attention of students and promotes better flow throughout the school day,” said Sandra Melo of the St. James-Assiniboia School Division. “Reducing anxiety for students with sensory needs is also a factor.”

The director of curriculum, assessment and professional learning said her division does not have any bell requirements and supports administrators’ decisions to mark the passage of time however they choose.

Many still use bell systems in some form, even if only to signal recesses, snack times and other non-instructional slots.

Auditory cues are particularly helpful for keeping music and phys-ed classes aware of timing, Melo said.

The Met Centre for Arts and Technology, an alternative public high school in the city’s core, opened without bells in the fall of 2021.

Principal-teacher Will Burton said it did not make sense to install any chimes, given both the unique nature of the loft space and that the Exchange District campus was founded to “reimagine what school could look like.”

Met staff deliver announcements to the tight-knit community in a central room in the mornings. Students study without alarm interruptions once they retreat to their core classrooms and switch subjects on a flexible schedule that can change based on a teacher’s professional judgment.

Burton called the 2023 model “a more humanistic way of learning” versus the longstanding industrial-era set-up, a nod to factories in which whistles were historically used to signal start, end and break times.

“What it’s led to is teachers being more in tune with student needs rather than what the clock says,” he said.

The school leader added: “More than anything, it’s allowing lessons to go their due course and not being cut off by a bell, forcing people out of a room or requiring people to go to another space.”

❏ ❏ ❏

An elementary school principal in Seven Oaks echoed the benefits of silencing alarms — a remnant of COVID-19 pandemic operations — during the day.

When masked staff members met inside Governor Semple School in September 2020 to discuss how to welcome students back safely, they realized cohorting measures were going to spike the number of noisy alerts required for divided recesses.

One employee suggested they stop using sound altogether and the entire staff team be more mindful of time to avoid the constant disruption that would ensue if they relied on noises to manage multiple schedules.

“I have to admit I was really skeptical at the time,” recalled Sari Rosenberg, principal of the kindergarten-to-Grade 5 school. “I’m happy to say it was super successful and, in fact, we noticed all of these other benefits that we hadn’t considered when we stopped ringing bells.”

Among those benefits: sudden disruptions no longer trigger dysregulation among students who have sensory challenges; teachers don’t get cut off in the middle of reading a book or another lesson; and children constantly practise how to tell time.

Rosenberg noted all classrooms have an analog clock.

“For us, as a collective, as a staff, (one pandemic takeaway) is how important it is to challenge the status quo and try different things,” she said.

Governor Semple continues to cohort recesses so more students can access the play structure during their break and assigns different grades to different sets of doors to limit crowding in the wake of the pandemic.

The school still has bells to mark the start and end of the day, but Rosenberg said their future is in question.

“We find not having bells is in the best interest of kids and that’s why we continue to do it. If it wasn’t, we would put a bell system in,” Burton said during one of the final days of the Met’s operations in late June.

The high school principal urged his colleagues in other buildings, especially where educators are assigned to a single group for an entire day or a schedule block spanning either the entire morning or afternoon, to consider doing away with traditional bells.

The Louis Riel School Division is in the process of changing all of its bells to chimes.

Over the summer break, three schools are slated to undergo upgrades so roughly half of all schools in the St. Vital area have chimes available for use.

This story was originally published in The Free Press. It is republished under a Creative Commons license as part of the Local Journalism Initiative.