[mdouglass]

The law does actually - you can have zero period but it can’t count towards the instructional time required for students.

It’s actually deeply annoying for my daughter’s high school. It already started 1st period at 830, but since 0 period no longer “counts”, the day is getting extended by almost an hour for all students.

This is from an email from our district earlier in the year:

The exceptions to this are zero period classes. Since zero period classes are optional and not required, these classes may begin before 8:30 AM; they just cannot be used to meet the instructional minute's requirements of 64,800 annual schoolwide instructional minutes