What new start times means for students

BY CHRISTIAN GOLDEN

As many have first heard earlier in May, the announcement for the possibility of new starting times next year which have been met with split opinions. The reason this was brought up as a possibility was to try to fix 4 problems: student mental health, lower car crashes, less tardies, and make test scores higher. The action of pushing back the starting times of school for middle and high school when learning is most vital have possibilities of fixing these problems through giving students more sleep. This was found by multitudes of studies that the delaying of school time benefited the students mentally by lowering sleep loss. With High School times going from 7:30 to 8:40 in the proposed plans, students will be able to get an extra hour of sleep. However this also means school end times would be pushed back as well going from 2:05 to 3:15.

This is where some students have problems with the proposed plans. Some students have said that doing athletics or having a job after school will be harder to do, now that the end of school will be later. This is due to the time constraint of the limited daylight hours and the many responsibilities students have after school which will make things like sports or jobs harder to do after school with the new time. Though it can be noted that if the times of the school changes the workplace times will most likely shift accordingly allowing students to be able to work similar amounts of however later than usual.

A big problem that the delayed times fix is the transportation problems that riddle the Vancouver school district. Many extracurricular activities like sports struggle to find constant and reliable transportation which is a flaw of how early high school’s begin. This is due to the need for transportation to take both elementary and middle school students while with the new plan only middle school will end after high school. This frees up more transportation in terms of buses. The delayed times also give the parents of students easier windows of being able to pick up students from extracurriculars due to high school ending an hour later than currently. This would allow more students to enjoy extracurriculars with no transportation like clubs.

The problems this new idea fixes are crucial to students’ learning and enjoyment in school but bring new problems to the students that weren’t faced before. This proposal is something that will affect each student differently based on the circumstances each student has so there is no clear answer as to if this is the right choice for Vancouver School District but hope we don’t regret the choice that is made during the next coming school year.