“Is tomorrow late start Wednesday?”

“No, that’s next week, right?”

“Uh-uh, it’s only when we have five days in a week.”

“That can’t be right…it’s tomorrow.”

The new late start Wednesday system is not only inconvenient for the students, but also confusing. The dates for late start confuse the students because they occur more than early Thursdays, however, not as often as every week. Also, the new system  inconveniences students and their parents because half of them cannot drive and are dropped off while their parents are on their way to work.

Some students even have younger brothers and/or sisters who go to elementary schools or middle schools that start around 8 a.m. This means that on late start days students will have to adjust and either come later to school or a lot earlier. Daily routines will be complicated and students will be waiting at the school an hour earlier than school starts. This results in a necessity for campus guards to monitor early students. This new system appears not as effective as early release Thursdays.

Carlsbad High School students used to be content with early Thursdays, ecstatic even. But now, our supervisors have presented us with a new system, where instead of two hours and twenty minutes of a break after school, we receive one hour and five minutes of a break before school normally starts. Before the new system, on early Thursdays students gained plenty of extra time to complete or even get ahead on homework. Now students barely gain an extra hour of sleep.

By creating this new system, perhaps the staff at CHS were simply trying something new and now students sleep in instead of getting out early and Starbucks instead of Cessy’s. However, if that was the case, then the time difference should be the same as it was in the past.

In addition, students at Carlsbad High School did not ask for this change. Not only did we not ask for it, but it was not even created to benefit us. The new late start idea was developed to accommodate teachers who now have meetings every week. This allows time for all the teachers to collaborate, grade and prepare for the new Common Core standards they must implement. Now there is no conflict for teachers, but the system has inconvenienced some 3,200 people the administration has forgotten about: the students.

The dates are confusing, the time is inconvenient for the students and parents, and the overall system is flawed. Hopefully, someday CHS will bring back our legendary early days, but for now the students are looking at a whole school year filled with late starts.