A later start time for Nauset High School has improved academic performance and perked up students’ moods.

EASTHAM — School district officials hoped that a later start time for Nauset High School would save money, improve academic performance and perk up the student mood.

As the song goes, two out of three ain’t bad.

The high school now starts its day at 8:35 a.m., more than an hour later than last year. A preliminary report about the first two months of school seems to indicate the change has paid off with big improvements in academics as well as a huge drop in the number of days students were suspended from school.

Tardiness also declined by nearly 30 percent.

“I think the tone of the day has changed dramatically. That’s reflected in the overall (mood) of the student body,” said Nauset High School Principal Tom Conrad. “It’s very clear to me it’s a more relaxed opening of school than with the 7:25 a.m. start time. Students seem to be more alert and they don’t seem to be rushing to get to class within seconds of getting to school.”

For years, Conrad had advocated moving to a later school day based on studies that showed positive effects on student health and well-being, as well as academics. Although only the first two months of the school year were analyzed, there was a 53 percent drop in the number of failing grades, from 221 last September and October to 104 in the same time period this year.

The number of D’s and F’s also dropped, from 597 to 368, a 38 percent decline. The number of days students were suspended for disciplinary reasons plummeted from 166 in the first two months last year to 19 days in September and October of this year.

The change was very beneficial for Douglas Scalise’s son, a sophomore at Nauset whom his dad described as a night person.

“It makes total sense to have older kids going to school later,” Scalise said. It gives the older students a better chance to be successful, especially given the more rigorous scholastic load and the importance to their future of doing their best, he said.

But not everything has worked out as hoped.

School officials had hoped that combining the middle and high school bus routes would result in an estimated $91,000 savings in transportation costs.

But Nauset business manager Hans Baumhauer believes those savings may be a lot lower because of the need to add buses back onto routes to avoid long wait times for middle school students on the afternoon run.

Another byproduct of the schedule change has been a big jump in tardiness at the elementary and middle schools.

The middle school, which moved its start time 30 minutes earlier to 8:30 a.m., had 421 incidents of tardiness this year compared with 258 in the first two months of last year as well as 225 more days absent. Eastham Elementary School saw tardiness double, as did Orleans. Both Brewster elementary schools also had significant increases. Wellfleet’s differential was relatively small.

The start time for the elementary schools is now 7:45 a.m., just 15 minutes earlier than the previous year, but Baumhauer thinks that parents may still have been adjusting to the change in the first month and that tardy numbers will drop.

“The first couple of weeks of September were pretty difficult. Parents who drop off (students) hadn’t worked all that out. They were getting kids there late,” Eastham School Committee vice chairwoman Joanna Stevens said.

Still, she said, her committee considered the data very preliminary and wants to see how it works out over the course of the school year.

Not all the news was bad for Eastham Elementary School, since administrators were able to institute a 20-minute outside play time before the start of school and that made for a better start to their school day, Stevens said.

“We want the best for all of the kids in the system,” she said.