As many students have noticed, we don’t have a short day every Friday. In fact, not even close to every Friday. The last time Highland had a short day was on Friday, October 4th. The next short day will be on November 22nd! That is six straight weeks without an early release. Although it may seem like such a little thing. Having an hour taken off of a school day, especially heading into a weekend, can be a big deal for students.
“Early outs on Fridays make the classes go by so much faster,” said Junior Porter Rockwood. “The short days are a perfect way to start the weekend, and it makes me look forward to Friday.”
The reason for the decreased number of short days isn’t very simple. The District has a required number of learning hours that each school must meet throughout the year. Although the school days may feel plenty long, there is more time out of class than people think.
“There’s hour requirements for our school. Our district requirement is 180 school days, and 1000 hours of education time,” said Highland Principal Jeremy Chatterton. “The trick is that you have to take out lunch and passing periods. So, it’s just the 90 minutes four times. That’s your school day.”
Between each class there is a five-minute period where students can get from class to class. This alone takes out 15 minutes in a school day. Along with this is lunch, which takes out another 30.
Another thing that doesn’t get recognized is that when we pushed the start of school up to 8:45, we only took the end of school back 45 minutes. Which creates 15 minutes of learning that is taken out of every single day.
“Other schools in our district have longer passing periods in between classes like west has a longer one,” said Chatterton. “They were not reaching their minimum hours required, and we got close, so we needed to cut some short days.”
This gets us dangerously close to the minimum hours limit for the year, which can be a very big problem. If the school doesn’t meet the minimum hour requirement for the year, things start to lose value. If you don’t have the right number of hours, your classes and credits can be invalidated which can ruin opportunities for the future.
“We were at 1001 1002 hours last year and West was at like 994 so we just wanted to make sure to make that so that we don’t get discredited.” said Chatterton.
To resolve the short-day debate in a way that still meets the minimum hour threshold for the district and makes students happy, I think we should make a time change in the school day schedule. If we were to take the start time back just 15 minutes to 8:30, I think that we could bring regular short days back with the extra time gained from that.
If we were to start 15 minutes sooner every day, that is an hour and 15 minutes per week of extra learning time that we otherwise wouldn’t have. With an extra hour and 15 minutes every week, I think that there would certainly be enough time to have regular short days again.
As a student I don’t think that it would be that bad to wake up 15 minutes earlier, and it would totally be worth it to have an early out at the end of the week to kick off the weekend. This resolution would make students and administration happy, and I think that it would resolve all of the student complaints.
“It would be really nice to have short days back,” said Junior Peter Conde. “I understand that we need more hours, but being able to count on an early release at the end of every week just makes me happier.”
Either way, Highland remains committed to creating a better learning environment for students, and helping teachers get more resources to teach. Working towards a better community at Highland, where everyone belongs.
“We went through the Calendar, and we cut mostly November and December short days. So, we cut eight or nine short days, to be around 1010.” said Chatterton.
