Recently, school administration and faculty have been discussing the possibility of including a short activity period in the school’s bell schedule. Students could use the time for tutorials, homework, or simply socialization.

It makes sense to have this as a part of the student schedule and the school should implement it for the 2016-17 school year. High school is the peak of a student’s life thus far, and it’s also the most stressful time of their life. Freshman already stress over GPA, sophomores and juniors struggle to maintain good grades, and seniors juggle with college applications on top of regular schoolwork. It’s even more difficult in an extremely competitive environment, like the one that we have here on campus.

Because of that, there are tutorials for students who need some extra help, but they would have to come before or after school to attend those, outside of the late start and end to the school day. Furthermore, students have extracurriculars to devote their little time to. As it is now, it’s like the only way to succeed is to spend the entire day at school. The school might as well build dorms.

Additionally, there are many reasons why adolescents aren’t getting nearly the amount of sleep that they’re supposed to be getting. Some might say that students are distracted by social media, but more often than not, they’re staying up past midnight finishing homework and studying for tests. Losing sleep on a daily basis could discourage students to even care about their grades, leading to a drop in academic performance.

With the activity period, students would be able to use their time to finish their school obligations and gives them more opportunities to participate in outside-of-school activities and their hobbies.

However, there’s been concern about the activity period affecting Centennial High School’s schedule as well as some uncertainty at the value of the benefits. Some students take classes here that aren’t offered at Centennial, and the bus schedules that they depend on could be thrown off.

Frankly, there’s no reason Centennial couldn’t change their schedule slightly to match ours. Their students would also reap the benefits from the activity period without having to give up a class that they want to take at another school. It’s absurd to say that it’s too much work to tweak the bell schedules a little. If that were the case, students wouldn’t want to take classes at the CTE Center.

All in all, although there may be some complications that come with changing the bell schedule, it’s worth trying. Just observing other schools passively won’t answer the question of whether the activity period is valuable to the student body.