Out of the blue, the Wake County School Board decided to alter the bell schedule of its schools so that teachers could have an extra hour of planning added to their schedule.  Wait, what? The Board, which is all about diversity, improving EOG test scores, and supposedly improving the quality of education, has decided that it makes sense to take away an hour of instruction from students every Wednesday afternoon because the benefits of teacher planning outweigh the benefits of actual instructional time.  What a stellar example of extreme bureaucratic idiocy. They skirted the issue of state mandated hours of instructional time during the school year by adding 10 minutes to the beginning of each instructional day, so students now start their day 10 minutes earlier, so in their mind, it's all ok. Am I the only person who sees the absurdity of this, or who is frustrated at the fact that this was thrown upon us with no warning?  Where did this come from?  Where on earth did the Wake County School Board come up with the idea, how long had it been discussed, what was the though process?I'm sorry, but 10 minutes extra at the beginning of each day is not comparable to the making up a one hour block of instructional time.  Essentially, our students are being cheated out of valuable learning time.  You can teach a good deal of math skills over the course of an hour.  Over ten minutes, kids can socialize.  How about instead of giving teachers an extra hour of planning time once a week, we add 10 minutes to the beginning of every day, and implement five-day a week, hour -long foreign language instruction in every school?  Not in the budget?  Of course not. Because with the extra planning hour for teachers, it's going to cost the school board nothing - teachers sure aren't going to get paid extra for that hour.Aside from all of these unanswered questions comes the ultimate confusion over the school schedule for all of us who are parents, especially those with kids in both elementary and middle or high school.  For parents who work full-time, it's an even more difficult problem.  The schools do a poor enough job as it is in terms of verification and reminders of early release days.  Now we as parents are supposed to keep track of the fact that on Wednesdays, unlike the rest of the week, we need to remember that school lets out an hour earlier.  Except on the special days that will be scheduled on six random Wednesdays throughout the school year, in which kids will be let out two-and-a-half hours earlier.  And the 2009-2010 school calendars, already posted on the wcpss website, have not yet been updated to reflect these new early release days.    Yet another reason the Wake County School Board leaves me scratching my head.