In favor of a shorter school day

I could not tell you how many times I’ve heard fellow students talk about how little sleep they’re getting and how they’re spending hours each day working on their homework. School is in session from 8:30am-3:00 pm. That’s a total of six and a half hours each day, five and a half if you exclude our hour-long lunch period. This isn’t very long in comparison to the average workday.

Except, students aren’t done working once school is over. Extracurriculars are a huge part of students' lives. Once we consider those, the numbers quickly start adding up. Firstly, most upper school clubs here at Parker occur in the first or second half of lunch, bringing the number back up to six hours. Most students also participate in sports or theater, and some even have jobs. These usually run until about 5:00 pm after school, sometimes even 5:30 pm. This brings the hours to seven and a half. If we add the two hours that students often claim to spend on homework, that brings us to nine and a half hours daily.

It is generally recommended that a teen sleep for nine and a half to ten hours each night. This leaves a minimum of four and a half waking hours that a student has to themselves. It’s still a fair amount of time, but a lot of this time ends up dedicated to necessary activities such as chores, breakfast and dinner, showers, and the like. Of course, almost all of this varies by day; there aren't always sports or rehearsals after school, and not all chores are daily. But for just a moment, let’s consider the average adult’s workday.

Adults can work for forty hours a week before they are required to be paid overtime. This, of course, leads to the average eight-hour workday during the week. In a survey in 2024, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that full-time employees work an average of 8.1 hours a day, which pretty much matches this expectation. Adults also, of course, have work to do outside their actual job, including childcare and finances. However, the BLS also found that the average person spends 5.1 hours daily participating in some kind of leisure activity, such as watching television. However, sport activities were included in this figure, which accounted for a good 2-2 ½ hours of what most students experience.

But sport credits are required to graduate, and if we keep that nine and a half hours, that gives us 47.5 hours weekly, well above the 40-hour work limit. I have two suggestions for how to lower this number:

One option is taking a half-hour to an hour off of the school day. Each day, we have a half-hour dedicated to an “advisory block” with five-minute passing periods on either side of the block. What we do during this time varies depending on the day. On Mondays, high school has grade-level meetings, and on Tuesdays, we have family meetings in the theater. Oftentimes, these meetings only last fifteen minutes, and we have twenty minutes free before we have to be at our next class. I appreciate this break time, but if we got rid of it and reduced our passing periods to five minutes each, we could get out of school over half an hour earlier. It may not seem like a lot to impact those forty-seven hours, but I think it would be worth it.

My other suggestion is perhaps a little more radical. By reducing the school week to four days, more than twice as much time is recovered as using the first option. This fifth day could be used for many things. It could simply be a third day of the weekend. The mornings (or afternoons) could also be used as a time for students to meet with their teachers when they needed help, making it much easier to meet with teachers than the current hope-thirty-minutes-is-enough-time-to-learn-what-you-missed-in-class method. In fact, I think that it could be good to implement this in the work week as well.

Or, we could just continue convincing ourselves that it's fine. We all work overtime occasionally, we’ve handled the stress for years, we’ll be fine. It’s all fine.

BLS American Time Use Survey 2024 - https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf