Beginning this school year, the administration switched Thursday and Wednesday block day schedules to accommodate student athletes who usually have meets or games on Thursdays.
With the previous schedule, athletes who left school early for games missed sixth period. With the new block switch, athletes who need to leave early will miss seventh period, and since fewer students have a seventh period class, athletes will miss less class.
With missing less class, there are hopes that the change will lessen student workload and promote academic success.
“We just had a lot of students missing class for after school activities last year, especially missing a block period, and depending on what that block period was and how the teacher runs that class, that could be really stressful and really hard to make up,” said assistant principal Lisa Nagendran. “I know a lot of our science classes, for example, give labs on block days and labs are really challenging to find time to make up, and it’s hard on the teachers and hard on the students.”
Junior Nathan Chu, a member of the track and field, talked of the dilemma of missing a class last year.
“It really sucked because I would come back and be so confused since I missed an entire block period and it was stressful because I had to make up work from class on top of the homework I had,” he said. “I picked up the material I missed and understood it pretty quickly, but it was definitely more straining.”
Junior Mirielle Haslam’s participation in soccer and track influenced her scheduling decisions.
“Because last year I missed a lot of class being in sports, I decided that it would be best to not have a seventh period this year,” she said.
As for students like junior Kevin Yang who is a pianist, chamber musician, and part of Aragon’s robotics team, this change may help him.
“Since the robotics team has decided to switch meetings from Thursdays to Wednesdays in accordance with the schedule change, this should help me more evenly distribute my homework load on block days as I got home at 3:45 p.m. on Wednesdays but 9 p.m. on Thursdays,” he said.
As for transit, new times and accommodations have already been made.
“We have a school district bus that comes from Foster City and they have switched their schedule,” Nagendran said. “So I think it will basically be the same bus schedule, but it’s flipped days, but they’ll send the students that information. Then SamTrans has two special buses for Aragon and those ones they have already changed for us.”
