Every Wednesday, students are required to be in their fifth-period classes for an extra 19 minutes for homeroom. During this time, there are either videos that students often do not pay attention to, or students are using their phones scrolling social media or playing games. Homeroom is not effective and necessary, and should thus be removed from our school’s bell schedule.
Compared to last year, the district has issued more videos on bullying as well as videos on digital citizenship. While this is a good effort by the school, there are not enough students paying attention to the videos for them to have the desired impact. Since students do not pay attention, there is no point in allocating so much time for these videos. Additionally, the videos and lessons played during this time also feel very rushed and contain information that seems like common sense. Some teachers skip steps of the lesson and do them to check off that their class participated. This, in turn, leads to students not getting that much information, which is the whole purpose of homeroom.
While students not doing anything this may be an enforcement issue, even when there are no homeroom activities, students remain unproductive. Students essentially doing nothing for 19 minutes is not the most effective use of time as they could have actually been in their fifth-period class doing schoolwork, instead of sitting and waiting for the bell to ring to get started with class.
As for what to replace the extra time with, the school can simply extend lunch or evenly add minutes to all of the other periods. Similar to the schedule on rally days where period lengths are adjusted, the same can be done for Wednesdays to ensure that students are in school until the typical release time.
Additionally, the way a teacher uses homeroom time is up to their discretion. When there are no required videos, some teachers make the period a break for their students, while others start class early. Students who are in a class that does work the entire period may view this as unfair compared to other students who may simply have free time. Ultimately, it shouldn’t matter where a student is for homeroom as they should all be doing the same activities anyway, which currently is not the case. To eliminate the disparity in how homerooms are operated, the 19 minutes can be removed and instead added to other periods or lunch.
Having a homeroom period where students don’t do anything also leads to increased fatigue in students. Due to the nature of the schedule, students are returning from lunch and are thus already not as focused on their classes. Adding another 19 minutes of doing nothing on top of that just makes the transition into real class time harder for students. Although this time could be used to relax after lunch, I believe that having free time before class makes the transition into learning even harder for students.
While some may argue that homeroom is essential for announcements, I think there are simple solutions that our school can implement to replace such a long homeroom period. Similar to how there are announcements on all other days besides Wednesdays, the school can play the announcements at the beginning of second period. As for the informational videos, the content can simply be sent in an email or ParentSquare notification so that both students and parents are notified. Although some videos such as ones on the topics of school safety and bullying are important and require special attention, I still think that dedicating a significant portion of time to them in school is not effective, especially since many students don’t pay attention to them.
With how competitive school is nowadays, students making the most out of their time is of the utmost importance. Having 19 minutes during which students essentially do nothing is not helpful for the students, and should thus be phased out entirely from the school schedule.