The first tardy bell of the day rings at 7:50. At this time, students should all be in class, getting ready for the day, and watching EBN (St. Thomas morning announcements). The class promptly begins at 8:00 a.m. On a block day, there are four classes in the day, with lunch and community time, a late start, or communio.
Each class is one hour and twenty minutes long and there is a five minute passing period in between. After speaking with many students at St. Thomas, there is a growing consensus that the school day could be shortened by just tweaking the schedule here and there.
The first tweak to the schedule is shortening the class periods by around 15 minutes, immediately taking off one hour of school time.
“Often those last 15 minutes of class are used to work on an assignment that is due the next class period. In my AP Statistics class, we finish lessons, pretty regularly, with 15 minutes to spare and Mrs. Pearson will give us that time to work on our homework for that night.” George Baba “25 said.
Although many students would agree that it is nice to be able to get ahead of some homework for the night, it can be made up by more time after school to get it done because we have a shorter school day.
Even in my AP Biology class, we will usually finish labs early, or if we have a lecture, Dr. Nordloh understands that a full hour and twenty minutes is too long to obsess over genetics and natural selection, so he gives us those last twenty minutes to work on an assignment that he gave us.
The next major tweak that could be made is eliminating community time, late starts, and shortening lunch.
Scratching a late start or community time out of our day takes 30 minutes off the school day. Understandably, community time is a perfect period during the day to socialize, get some work done, grab a snack, etc., but again, this could be made up for by the time off from school.
I think if students are unhappy with taking away community time, make the passing period between the first and the second class of the day 10 minutes, so students are still able to hang out with friends for some time or grab a snack. Shortening lunch to 35 minutes would then shave off another 20 minutes from the day.
With these changes being implemented, we would be released from school by 1:35 pm instead of 3:10 pm. Not only would this give kids more time after school to do homework, but sports will also practice much earlier, giving student athletes less stress to get home and get work done, especially those who do not live near St. Thomas.
