In a few years, the problems of having friends, or competitive school sports, may no longer be issues.  Our school district will see to that.  Their solution: split-day school.  No more will you have to see your friends every day!  No more will you have to do extracurricular activities at a reasonable time of day!  Each half of the school will get its own personal time, starting early in the morning, or ending well into the evening.  This “solution” is not the best, nor the most practical fix to our overcrowding issues.  For example, how do we decide who goes in the morning and who goes in the evening?  When will you ever get to know people with school at the other time?  How and when will the change be instituted?  How will teachers adjust to the longer work day?  These are all nearly unanswerable questions that the school district will be forced to answer.

The first problem that will be encountered is how to split up the school day.  There are only a couple divisions that would be even relatively plausible.  The first would be to divide by grade level.  At first glance, this doesn’t seem to have any problems, but a deeper analysis reveals some major flaws.  The most obvious is that you can’t get to know upperclassmen as an underclassman, or vice versa.  This sounds a little bit childish; you can just make other friends that have school at your same time, but realistically, you are limited to having friends in your same grade.  If you try to befriend someone not in your grade, they will be gone the next year.  For example, if you’re a sophomore, you would have school at the same time as the freshmen.  Then next year, you would be a junior and have school at the same time as the seniors, leaving the freshmen (who are now sophomores) to be with the incoming freshmen.  At the same time, the school would have to stop offering advanced classes, and classes less advanced than the grade you’re in.  Unless the especially advanced and especially non-advanced students would like extra hours of school, I can’t foresee any way that it would work.

The other division of the school day that would make sense is to split based on the classes you’re taking.  This way, nobody is excluded from taking any classes that they want to take.  Every year, the division would be recalibrated so that the split matches everyone’s schedule.  The first problem with this is that nobody would be allowed to drop or gain classes in the middle of the year.  Everyone’s schedule would be set in stone, even if they hate their class, or they find that they aren’t capable of succeeding in a certain class.  Then there’s the problem of especially advanced and non-advanced students again.  Since they’re different ages than the others taking their classes, they would feel left out.

No matter how the day is split up, friends will be torn apart.  Friendships are built between every different type of person, older and younger, smarter and less smart, athletic and less athletic (not that the day would be split based on that). The point is that whoever goes at one time will almost always have friends at the other time.  And if a friendship does somehow weather the forces pulling it a part, there won’t be any time for them to see each other.  One would leave early and the other wouldn’t be back until late, at which point they would need to do homework, leaving no time for hanging out.  Families would also be negatively affected.  If they had two kids in different grades, they would have to be driving around all day.  My parents already have a hard time picking me up on time.  There have been more occasions that I can count where I was left sitting at school for almost an hour.  I can only imagine how much worse it would be if my parents had twice as many opportunities to be late.  And I’m only one student of 1700; the problem would compound based on the sheer mass of transportation needed.

Along with the logistical nightmare that split-day school would be, it would also be horribly ineffective.  The half day of school is about the same as a.m.-p.m. kindergarten.  With only half of the time previously available, there won’t be enough time for everything to be done that needs to be.  Whether they keep a block schedule or change to a “C day” schedule, time will not be available in the quantities necessary for learning.  Even though the learning period for each individual student will be shorter, the work day for each teacher will be much longer.  The end of the day will be very rough for teachers, as they will have been teaching for about 10 hours straight compared to the six and a half hours of a regular teacher in our school district.  Because of the length of time that teachers have to work, students with classes near the end of the day will have a worse learning experience than those with classes near the beginning.  It hardly seems fair that students who happen to have class at one time will learn less from school.

In conclusion, split-day school would be a severe detriment to our learning and shouldn’t get past the drawing board in our school district.  There’s no good way to split up the school, friendships will be crushed, and nobody will have a good learning experience.  The simple solution is to express our dissatisfaction with this proposition.  As high school students under the age of 18, we can’t really do much to influence the decision of our school district, but our parents can.  In order to stop this idea, we need to inform our parents of the issue at hand, and urge them to deny the school district if it so much as brings up split-day school.