Online school is hard for parents, teachers, and students. Sophomores Kai Chow and Thu Lan Phan created a petition to change how students are learning online. Chow and Phan suggest that online learning should be limited to no more than 30 minutes per day versus the four and a half hours per day it is now. Their reasoning is that it would allow for more individual out of call work and one on one learning.

“If we had smaller groups of people who just really needed that help as opposed to everyone in the class when some people don’t need the help. Then, teachers could spend time focusing on those smaller groups,” Chow said.

The petition has been signed by nearly 300 students and has caused students to consider how staying on a computer for one and a half hours three times a day is bad for their eyes and mental health. It has also raised awareness of how stress and anxiety rates have spiked because of the amount of homework provided.

“I’m normally a pretty happy guy I would say but then suddenly this year I’ve just been a lot more sad I don’t know, and I talked to some of my friends about it. And we came to the conclusion that there could be a different way of doing online school,” Chow said.

Dr.Bryan Brocket, CHS principal was asked about his thoughts on the ideas shared in the petition. Specifically, his thoughts on moving to limit online learning to no more than 30 minutes per day and to see if the proposal would meet the school requirements for online learning.

“[The state legislature passed] SP98 this year, and students need to do 270 minutes of work per day. The combination of those minutes can be both synchronous and asynchronous, can be like time just for the teacher or it can be the equivalent minutes of work assigned,” Brockett said.

So, even though there can be a balance of online and offline work, there are a number of requirements that schools are required to meet.

“So we already have a distance learning model that has fewer minutes in class than we would have in a regular live in-person model. So I think there’s some concern there,” Brockett said. “I would encourage any students, that might be, you know, feel like it’s a lot of time, maybe just screentime, or in front of the camera, or whatever it may be, I would encourage them to talk to their teachers about what’s working, what’s not working,” Brockett said.

Not only have students been encouraged to share their thoughts with teachers to help improve the virtual experience but teachers have been encouraged to listen to student feedback as a way to improve the class experience.

“I’ve encouraged our teachers to have those conversations as well, I think it’s important for us to embrace and understand what the student experiences are right in this, and especially given this is something completely new, for, you know, the vast majority of our teachers and students don’t have experience in the online environment,” Brockett said.

As students and teachers adjust to this new method of learning, teachers have been trying to get materials and books available for pickup. Teachers are doing this so that students have the opportunity to get off their computers a little more.

“I know that some of the English teachers have reached out about, you know, making sure that we can provide some additional print materials to students, and not have everything be provided online, Aand so we’re working on ways and you know, in certain classes to make that available, teachers are asking about it so that you can come by, pick up the printed copy of it, and then you wouldn’t be on your computer,” Brockett said.