Split fourth period poses unfair advantage

9:32 a.m, 11:04 a.m, and 3:08 p.m, the strangest possible times for a class period to end. While the new schedule changes make the bell schedule both awkward and harder to memorize, it brings drastically bigger problems as well.

Excluding the time of the passing period, lunches have been shortened to 25 minutes long. This poses a long list of problems including students not being able to finish their lunch and not having enough social time to break up the monotony of the day.

While being unable to properly eat and digest their food, students are unable to enjoy the shortened time they have with their peers, the brief 25 minute relief from an otherwise seven hours of intense academic pursuit. This also creates an abnormally long fourth period, a 55 minute class instead of a 47-minute period.

These extra eight minutes may seem insignificant, but by the end of the week that’s nearly an entire class period. This gives students an unfair advantage in these fourth period classes; if students are given “the entire class period” to take an exam which class period is that based on?

Is it based on the schedule of the student that has a 47 or 55 minute long class? Does the kid with the longer class get an advantage, or are they given the shorter time and then sit there and waste the remaining eight minutes of class?

The administration has made these changes in efforts to meet seat time requirements. While the student body understands that these state mandates must be met, there are many solutions and compromises that are more accommodating to the needs of students as well.

These last mandatory minutes can be gained in countless other ways than by shortening lunches, a minute can be taken out of the passing period, or the most realistic solution would be to push the school day back to ending at 4:15pm.

This small change, combined with a four-minute passing period instead of five, would allow for a 47-minute lunch, returning to an eight period schedule which would allow students the lunchtime social interaction that they need.