New Schedule

Alexander Ursu

As officially announced last Tuesday, Whitney  Young will be switching schedules on October 5th. Featuring an earlier start time, longer classes and overall more screen time, this new schedule has not pleased many students. Junior student Dylan Chhay ‘22  stated “I dislike waking up at 8” and senior student Tristan Kenny ‘21  said, among lots of other things, “I think the new schedule is hot trash, nobody wants to have 90 minute classes”. Now the real question is why was the schedule changed in the first place?

I have two theories. First is the lack of a proper lunch period. Because of our new block schedule, we only have our normal lunch period every other day. Some students, such as freshman Daniel Roman, did not feel that they did not have enough time to eat with our old schedule. This, however, may not be an enormous problem, as our 75 minute division should give students plenty of time to eat. Dylan Chhay also says “And I think the fact that we have a thirty minute lunch period after advisory is redundant”. My second theory, which is a little bit more of a conspiracy, is that our old schedule failed to reach some CPS requirement. On the Chicago teacher’s union website, it states that cps expects educators to meet the minimum expectations of four hours of daily interaction/remote learning. I believe that this requirement may apply to students as well. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, as the four periods in each day would amount to five hours. However, on days in which students have lunch, students receive three hours and forty-five minutes of remote learning, just under the minimum. This is not only happening at Whitney Young. According to Payton student Christopher Gora, the former Payton schedule which set Wednesdays as an independent learning time was changed because “cps shut it down.” 

Whatever the reason., a change seemed to be necessary.  Was this new schedule the best option though? To answer this, I turned to chemistry teacher Paul Kash, who said that there were two new schedules being debated among administrators and teachers, the one being currently adopted, and one in which we have all eight periods each day, with both schedules having the same start and end time. Of all the people students I talked to, a majority said that they prefer a block schedule for an online environment. All in all, although I hate to admit it, it seems that this new schedule is the best of a bunch of bad options.