Have you ever received a bad grade in a class because you were too busy to do the homework, or you couldn’t meet up with a friend to do a project, resulting in your partner having to do the brunt of the project, and they are upset with you because you weren’t available to help them out? Wouldn’t you be upset too? This problem could be avoided if school ended earlier to allow students to do the other things that are part of their lives, in addition to homework.
I work at the local Portillo’s, so I’m busy until 12 p.m. after waking up at 6:30 a.m. and going through a full day of school. By the time I get home, I am so exhausted that the only thing I want to do is go to sleep, but I still have a large workload of homework to complete, so I must stay up until 2 a.m. to finish it. Sometimes, I just don’t do it. Then, the teacher gets so mad, and my grade goes down, my parents get mad, privileges get taken away…it’s just a bad day.
I don’t mean to imply that work and other extracurriculars should be viewed as more important than schoolwork, but they definitely mean a lot to students. As a middle-class teenager, I don’t come from a lot of money, so I have to work for the things that I want. I know I’m not the only one in this situation, so having school end earlier would be better for students like me because we could have more time to do our homework and other household requirements before we go to work. This also means that we could prevent kids who have to close during the week from staying up all night in order to complete their homework and being exhausted as a result.
Not to mention that some kids don’t eat lunch—I have lunch at 10:30 a.m., so I don’t really want to eat lunch then. School starts at 7:20 a.m., which is pretty early, so ending school half an hour earlier could be more beneficial, because some people wait until after school to eat and skip lunch instead. Why not make lunch optional, or shorter?
The administration could take a survey to see how many people don’t eat lunch on a daily basis and adapt to students’ needs by making lunch periods shorter, or by possibly using a block schedule. I don’t eat lunch, so the administration could remove my lunch period from my schedule and just let me leave earlier than usual.
Overall, school should not end at 2:26 because kids need to have more time to do homework so they can go to work and find the time to do more things that will benefit them. I hope that the administration takes this and reflects on the positive effects of a time change for the sake of its students.
