Flex Time is a Big Win

Last year, on Thursdays, the halls were humming with complaints of “boring!” and “why can’t I just skip?” from most of the student body, and not for the usual reasons.
For 45 minutes a week, just before second period, students were forced to endure the monumental waste of time called advisory.
This mini-class period was sold to students under the guise of providing work time. But most of the class periods were filled with pointless presentations, movies, and awkward breathing exercises.
Nearly half of the student body made it a habit to skip advisory; those who didn’t, rarely got any real work done. During advisory, teachers had to manage entire classes of students who did nothing but just sit around for nearly an hour.
To make it even more impossible to manage, the students could not fail advisory even if they never attended.
Students couldn’t go to clubs during this time, it was inconvenient to talk to teachers, and half of their friends were probably skipping. At best, advisory allowed students to get homework done early; at worst, it was a waste and took away from actual work time in other classes.
This year, it seems the complaints were heard. In mid-September, the first flex time was introduced. This has been a monumental success that has helped students across the school to improve grades and decrease their academic stress. These 38-minute chunks of time have been a Godsend for students. In the first two weeks alone, I was able to write an entire article, memorize a speech, finish a project, and attend two club meetings…all during flex time.
Flex time is an opportunity to simply work on classes outside of the pressure of a class period. It is this freedom that makes flex time such an improvement on advisory. Flex time is a protected time for students to dedicate themselves to schoolwork, something vital for students who wouldn’t usually take the time to focus on their academics.
“It’s been really good to get students in, if they’re not students who wouldn’t typically stay after school,” Highland French teacher Amelia McCurdy said.
Flex time increases student-teacher interaction, helps students improve grades, and decreases academic stress — all the things that would be incredibly helpful have more than two days a week.
I believe it would be in the best interest of students to have flex time more than twice a week. My proposal is that students can have flex time Mondays through Thursdays. The lost class time is more than made up for when students have extra time to work on homework or get clarification for teachers.
As of now, flex time is scheduled on only Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but students have four classes a day and work that continues to pile up. On flex days, students know they have time to sort through the masses of work they get throughout the day and get a head start on assignments. With student stress rising each year and grades dropping, it would be a vast help to students to have flex time more than two days a week. Changing the schedule to make it so flex time is a Monday through Thursday event, not just something breaking up the middle of the week.
With more time every day to actually get work done, students would go home with far less stress and burnout. Students are juggling eight classes, often at the same time as multiple extra-curriculars. Thirty-seven minutes to break up the hours of studying and work might not seem like much, and it isn’t. That is precisely why we need more of it; adding in just over a half hour of breathing room a day would be an enormous help to students.
Because flex time has helped athletes as they can make up classes they miss for games, and students taking advanced classes are given extra time to talk to teachers and clarify assignments. While advisory gave students this same opportunity, its system of home room like teachers did nothing to alleviate stress and made it difficult leave to go talk to teachers outside your advisory class. All of this paired with those mandatory presentations often served as incentives for students to pay less attention or think of the period as increasingly pointless.
Also, students leaving during the middle of the day during advisory created unnecessary dangers of students off campus. WIth flex time, students who don’t want to participate can simply go home. Having it four days a week can also benefit students who have jobs. Because we get out of school later than other high schools in the state, the extra 37 minutes can make students more marketable to employers.
But mostly, it is about the academics.
“Students are actually using flex time,” McCurdy said. “When we implemented advisory, it was less effective, and we lost students over time.”
McCurdy says she gets around 15 students in her class a day, all there to work on things they need to get done for her class. She sees more on days when she hosts French Club, another valuable opportunity that flex time allows for. With academic clubs being allowed to meet in flex time, students can attend more meetings and it’s easier to manage and schedule.
Flex time is what advisory was meant to be; it gives students a chance to decompress after long school days and manage their workload during school hours. All advisory ever gave us was a headache and a chance to skip class.
This new block of time has significantly decreased student stress and increased the opportunities to improve grades and participate in school activities.
With these blocks of time barely taking nine minutes out of other class time and vastly affecting students’ attitude and stress levels, it’s time to take flex time further.