Catalina Foothills HIgh School Schedule Petition

As the undersigned students of Catalina Foothills High School (CFHS), we have become concerned with the 2011-2012 school year bell schedule. While there are likely benefits of increased funding with the increased school day length, the currently proposed schedule has many negative implications for the student body. The primary issues with the schedule can be abbreviated to issues for students that are athletes, club members, or hold jobs as well as the potential for students to have concentration problems in their final classes, especially with the outrageously late Thursday and Friday lunch period.

By being released later than previous years on certain days, many students find that their extracurricular activities may not fit into their schedule. Also, students participating in any school sponsored activity will miss copious amounts of class time for competitions (e.g. swim and dive, baseball, soccer, track) due to the fact that sports games will not be scheduled later in the afternoon to accommodate this irregular schedule.In addition, there is now much less time for clubs and other activities (school sponsored or not) to work outside of school (e.g. Band, Theatre, Boys/Girls Scouts, etc.). While the change in release time was not extreme, these activities were already running late in students evenings. Students who are trying to become more responsible and hold down after school jobs will also find themselves at a disadvantage in the job market since they would only be able to work increasingly late shifts. With sports practices, activities, and jobs running later into a students evening, that negatively impacts their time for homework and study, which puts club attending and sport playing students at an academic disadvantage with their peers.

CFHS students will also likely face issues with remaining attentive and focused in their final classes of the day, especially B lunch students on Thursdays and Fridays. With the longer class periods and overall longer school day, teachers can expect to see students sleepy and disinterested towards the last hour or two of the school day. Even though a decent amount of students may not be as drowsy as the others, it is the students who stayed up late studying and doing homework after their activities or sports that will find themselves lacking energy towards the end of the day, which will further hurt the more involved students. Another instance where teachers can expect students to be unfocused, tired, or disinterested is when a student has B lunch on a Thursday or Friday. According to the most recently released schedule (July 2011 Falcon Flyer), these students will not be sitting down to lunch until 2:00 PM. For a school day that starts only 30 minutes later, it is not acceptable that lunch should start over an hour later for half the student body. In terms of the affects of the schedule change on the student body, the benefits are far outweighed by the problems. This change can only lead to overworked students, and it will be the most involved students that are affected the worst.

While, as the undersigned members of the CFHS student body, we recognize that it may be too late to change the format of the schedule and do not expect and radical adjustments before school start, we strongly urge that the administration fully considers the impacts of the scheduling change. We would also request that schedules be adjustable so that a student with reason may request to have a free period moved to the beginning or end of the day to help deal with the changes in schedule. Students with jobs, significant involvement in extracurriculars that could meet early (during 7th/8th free), or planned involvement in sports that could meet early (also during 7th/8th free) should be able to request a different free period without complaint from the counselors or other staff. In addition, we suggest the splitting of class 5 on Thursdays and Fridays (as students with B lunch during a block class had during the 2010-2011 school year) in order to move the lunch period earlier into the day. These changes would not be unreasonable or impossible; therefore, We strongly recommend the consideration of these adjustments or any other similar adjustments to help ease this upcoming school year for the most involved of students.