CHS and Agoura High School currently have the same bell schedule that was in place for the 2022-2023 school year: a traditional schedule on Monday and a block schedule Tuesday through Friday. On Nov. 14, the LVUSD board approved a new schedule for the 2024-2025 school year that slightly changes this schedule, and while it fixes the issue of pointless support periods, a common problem still remains: traditional Mondays.
For a traditional schedule, students go through all six of their classes for 48 minutes, changing to 47 minutes for the new schedule. Because of these short class periods, it is understandable that many find these periods lacking in substance. There simply is not enough time to thoroughly teach anything in such a short amount of time. This, coupled with the stress that comes with having all classes during one school day, causes many to feel that LVUSD’s bell schedule would be better off without traditional days.
Naturally, this leads to a pressing question: What replaces traditional days? There are six classes to spread across five days—something has to give. However, this is not nearly as big of a problem as it first appears.
If the traditional day were replaced with a day of support, the issues of this schedule as well as many other problems would be solved. This support day would give students a chance to go to the classes they need help with, visit with counselors, have extra time to study and much more. Additionally, though it would still count as an absence, if students needed to schedule an appointment or had to miss school, they could do so during this support day, so as not to miss actual class time.
A support day would also help students with stress management, something that commonly needs improvement. Students would not have to worry about doing any or as much homework over the weekend if they had a day to do their homework during the week. This would give teachers a chance to give extra help to students who need it or catch up on grading or lesson planning.
A change in the LVUSD high school bell schedule like this would be helpful to both students and staff for a variety of reasons. Not only is it helpful, a day of support would eliminate all the problems traditional days create. Students’ stress and homework levels would decrease, staff would have an easier workload but most importantly, traditional days would have a purpose and seem less like a waste of time.
