Imagine you’re a student at North Atlanta High School. You are tired of your classes and you are sick of having to scarf down food in your ridiculously short lunch. Your wishes are answered with a series of school days being cancelled. There is a catch; the superintendent plans on finding a way to make up the lost time and now your 9-4 just turned into a 9-5 with shorter lunches and longer classes.

The additional 30 min to the end of the school day not only causes major issues with the bell schedule, it also causes all of the clubs to have issues. Some students and teachers have other responsibilities that the 30 minute push back would interfere with.

Students have jobs after school and the pushback causes them to take later shifts giving them less time to sleep, relax or study. The pushback causes students to leave right in the middle of rush hour. The traffic makes them even later to their job or house. This major loss in time will cause students to have less time for homework and studying. Students might resort to staying up even later than they currently do in order to finish that important project or essay.

Grades and test scores will actually drop because of this small gain in instructional time. Let’s address the elephant in the room; the school lunch. Before the changes in the schedule, the lunch was horribly sort but survivable. With this new schedule, the lunches are drastically shorter and truly unbearable. Students are already skipping class just to finish their lunch. Do you think shortening the lunch is a good solution to solving that problem? Absolutely not. Duh.

The use of the extra time could be used much more efficiently. A petition was started promoting putting the newly gained time toward a study period. The schedule would be the exact same except for an additional 30 min period. The bells wouldn’t need to be adjusted much and students wouldn’t get confused by the slight shift in time.

Students could use the time to complete homework, make up work they missed with teachers, go to tutorials during the school day. The solution certainly isn’t perfect but it does fix some of the issues.

The extra 30 minutes to the school day is unnecessary. It causes many issues in the current state is in. Of course, there are solutions but they do not fix everything. The true solution is to throw away the whole idea and opt for three days off of your break instead of this silly two month plan. Students might be mad initially that they have to give up part of their break but in the long run they will be glad they didn’t have to suffer for two months.