Schoolhouse Clock

[March 12th, 2008]

If daylight saving time last weekend wreaked havoc on your schedule, pity the poor students and teachers at Benson High School.

Thirty-three of the 100-plus clocks at the inner Northeast Portland school simply aren’t working, according to Portland Public Schools. And many haven’t been working since September, causing students and teachers to guess constantly when the next bell will ring, teachers say.

The problem is mundane, for sure. But fixing the broken clocks has proved to be next to impossible, giving Benson kids an unwanted lesson in physics, economics and patience.

In science teacher Chris Hager’s classroom the clock hands are stuck at 3 pm, “as if in constant anticipation of the ringing of each day’s final bell” at 3:05 pm, he says. Nearly every day, at least one student in his class of 35 teenagers distracts the others with an excited question about the time, he says.

The clocks at Benson are controlled by the school’s central office and are all tied to an antiquated system that runs on the resistance created by the circuits of the entire unit.

That’s the physics part. If school district officials removed the broken clocks en masse, they would throw the whole system out of whack, they say.

Here’s the economics lesson: the district has resisted spending hundreds of dollars to buy battery-operated clocks for teachers, since that leads to new problems, according to Randall Johnston, the district’s maintenance manager. If one teacher’s clock has one time, and another teacher’s clock has another time, students will be equally confused, Johnston believes. “It’s failed at other places and we hate to waste the money,” he says.

The district also has resisted the idea of taking clocks from a closed school and installing them at Benson, in the event that the district ever leased that closed school.

Josh Hjertstedt, a field operations manager for the district, says he’s known about the problem for “a couple of months.” Recently, he sent Benson’s secretary an email saying the problem affecting about one-third of Benson’s clocks would not be addressed “anytime soon.” Only one company services those clocks, and it’s on the East Coast, Hjertstedt says.

The good news—requiring still more patience—is Johnston has ordered 33 new clocks for the old system, which should be arriving in a couple of weeks. Other schools are having similar problems, says Johnston, but “Benson is probably the most egregious.”