A typical school week is usually very long. Each week at Desert Vista from 8:20 a.m. to 3:14 p.m., students must attend school, having the weekends as their break. This type of schedule is standard fare for many school districts, Desert Vista or otherwise. To compromise this, many schools offer a “short day” in their business weeks: a day that has shortened hours of attendance to reduce the repetitiveness the typical week brings, and Desert Vista is no stranger to this type of routine. Every Wednesday, in place of being released at 3:14 p.m, students are released at 2:12 p.m., a good hour short off the regular schedule, creating a longer afternoon. However, does this reduction significantly affect the overall repetitiveness of the normal day? In my opinion, short days should be short in the morning, not the afternoon.

In the average school day, most of the toil of the day resides in, believe it or not, the morning before school. Often, students wake up in the morning to a hassle. Trying to get out of the door and on the road to school not long after they wake is a part of my experiences and many others. Tired and struggling to learn, many students find themselves slogging through their first few periods and longing for lunch. Usually, the last few periods of the day are the periods they are best prepared for; they are fed with lunch, have woken up, and are energized. So why, exactly, do short days take time out of the latter half of the day? If time reduction is shifted to the morning, students would be able to prepare for the day better by coming to school later, when they are more focused and less tired.  Seeing that it would reduce the struggle for many students, I believe that short days should contain their time reduction in the morning, not the afternoon.