The first semester of the 2020-2021 school year has finally come to an end. Along with a stressful and anxiety-filled closing to the first half of the year, came a new bell schedule for Loudoun County Public Schools.
The original distance learning schedule was overall neutral for students. Advisory began at 9 a.m., and each class was only about an hour and a half. In that hour and a half, about 25 minutes of that time was dedicated to learning lab, where students worked asynchronously to complete their work. Lunch was from 12:17 – 1:07 p.m., allowing students to either go pick up lunch from the school and/or a restaurant or make themselves something at home. It also gave students a nice break from the computer screen.
The new schedule is very different from the first semester distance learning schedule. It is practically the schedule students had at Freedom High School when students were actually in the building. Blocks are now much longer, and lunch has switched back to the normal A, B, C and D lunches, which are all 30 minutes long. The new distance schedule has been said to feel “longer,” and some students have even said it makes them less productive due to the loss of learning lab. Junior Joshua Silva is just one of many students who feel negatively about the new schedule.
“Honestly, I really don’t like it,” Silva said, “It just feels so much longer, and now that I am sitting at my screen more listening to lectures, it makes me not want to complete homework as much anymore because I am already staring at my computer for a longer time. Why would I want to stare at it more outside of school?”
Senior Sydney Lemmerman felt similarly to Silva. As a senior, she believed that it was just overall incredibly unnecessary.
“The schedule change just made my senioritis so much worse than it already was,” Lemmerman said, “I am off to college soon, and more of this unnecessary screen time is the last thing I want to have to do.”
It is up in the air on whether or not this new schedule will start to grow on students, however based on those interviewed, it seems this is very unlikely.
