Among the plethora of changes this new school year holds, the Seven Hills faculty have decided to alter an aspect of the daily schedule that the upper schoolers have grown to love: community time. Previously placed at the end of the day as a way to unwind and relax after a long day of classes, the community time block has been moved to after lunch, a total disruption in students’ day-to-day lives. Despite the community’s varying perspectives and opinions on this topic, I believe this change has negatively impacted student life at Seven Hills.
With this new change, the upper school schedule has been altered to where students get out of class every day at 3:10, almost the exact same time as the lower and middle schools. This creates an immense amount of traffic for both students and parents after school, leading to difficulties when exiting parking lots and turning onto Red Bank Road. Junior Siddhant Chunduri said that this change “makes it impossible to get out of the junior lot” and explained that he “personally does not like it.” Similarly, junior Brenden McLaughlin expressed how students should be prioritized over parents and other drivers when leaving campus after school due to differences in driving experience. McLaughlin said, “The students who are newer drivers cannot handle the stress of this new traffic, so they should be prioritized over the parents who have been driving for years.” However, this prioritization would create tensions amongst the Seven Hills families, leading to even longer lines for the parents. With the entire school leaving campus at the same time every day, there is no plausible solution for these traffic problems, and this chaos will continue for the foreseeable future.
Additionally, this new break in the middle of the schedule makes the school days feel longer and mentally exhausting for students. Returning upper school students are used to having community time at the end of the day, and this disruption feels unnecessary to them. Sophomore Beckett Ceron said, “I don’t like it. I like having my breaks throughout the day, but there’s now too long of a period between my classes.” When asked about having extra help after lunch, Ceron said, “At lunch, everyone’s kind of fooling around, and they know they still have classes later. No one is thinking seriously about school, and they’re not going to go see their teachers to get extra help in the middle of the day.” During this time, most of the school is outside socializing, continuing to eat lunch with their friends, or meeting with a club. These distractions decrease the chances of a student getting extra help, as they may find more exciting events happening around the school. With the old schedule, many people left school after class, and students who needed extra help had little to do on campus besides seeing their teachers. Librarian Gail Bloom, who initially advocated for this change, said, “I like it a little better for certain things…but I hate it for extra help days.” On these days, the library is flooded with students, leading to disruption in the building. Chunduri said, “Every time I go to the library during extra help, half of the school is in there.” For the students who do take advantage of extra help, this limited amount of time can sometimes lead them to be late to their third block class after a long conversation with their teacher, rather than having a flexible end to this time period in the previous schedule. This change has disrupted the Seven Hills community, an unnecessary change from the well-accepted routine of the previous schedule.
On the other hand, some argue that this change allows for a smoother transition between specific community time events, such as all-school meetings and pep rallies. However, this limited time right after lunch is rarely enough to get through all the events on the daily agenda. Often, pep rallies feel short and rushed compared to last year, where special schedules were used to ensure we had enough time at the end of the day to get through the community time events. Additionally, some may argue that the only reason people are upset about this change is because they miss when students were allowed to leave school right after classes at 2:45. But the truth is, who wouldn’t want to leave early? This may be a true statement, yet it still does not take away from the thorough argument that this change has negatively impacted student and teacher life at the school.
This change in community time has led to an incredible amount of traffic, disruption in students’ day-to-day lives, and utter chaos at Seven Hills. At the end of the day, it should be up to the students to decide if they want to take advantage of community time to visit teachers and get help. The school should not take these matters into their own hands but rather leave it up to the students and give them the freedom to make these choices for themselves, as they are the ones who are directly affected by this unnecessary and disruptive change.
