High school students reacted with a mix of optimistic and frustrated views on the 2023-24 high school schedule, with some students experiencing confusion on the overall structure.

Every school day will start at 8:30 a.m. and end at 3:30 p.m. across the lower, middle and high schools. The new schedule standardizes high school class times, and has a variation designated for weeks with co-curricular programming. 

Ninth grader Danyal Shah believes standardizing the schedule with the lower and middle schools facilitates a more practical schedule for his family. 

“Usually now what ends up happening is my brother has to wait for me, or I need to wait for him, since our classes end at different times,” he said. “So I like this new system because it just makes everything more simple for us.”

Sophomore Wendell He believes one of the general misconceptions of the new schedule is that students will lose their free time during the school day, since the schedule eliminates the eighth class period and replaces it with four lab or co-curricular periods. Wendell was able to clarify their questions with a teacher, but thinks many other students still have unanswered questions. 

“I think this schedule is better for me, but one of the downsides is I’m going to have to adjust a lot of my extracurriculars,” Wendell said. “Because I’ll be getting out at a later time, I’ll have to change all my violin and piano lessons.”

Sophomore Juana diSabato expressed frustration over the later end time since her extracurriculars cannot be rescheduled.

Like Juana, Julia Grotthus commutes to school, and she said due to traffic, the 30-minute difference will have a limited impact. They believe their amount of sleep will not improve with the later start time, as Lab parents hoped when they advocated for this change.

The new schedule eliminates a weekly 75-minute period to standardize class times at 50 minutes, a feature junior Carter Chang appreciates, as he said the 75-minute periods can feel tedious. However, sophomore Henry Auxenfans will miss the variation of attending 45- and 75-minute classes.

“I think now having 50-minute classes, you know, is not bad, but I feel like having one long class that is more than an hour per week is really nice because you get to experience the full class,” Henry said.

Ultimately, junior Alex Rupple thinks the shift can have an overall positive effect but is doubtful that student habits will change.

“I think the change is probably a good thing, but I don’t think it will do that much because kids are just going to stay up later,” Alex said. “Overall, it’s half an hour, it’s half a homework assignment, but it’s good in the sense of progress.”

Additional reporting contributed by Zara Siddique and Taariq Ahmed.