When a new year comes around, I always wonder what the schedule will look like. The school usually changes it up every year, sometimes creating confusion and sometimes solving a problem.

The bell schedule from 2022-2023 moving up the school start time was good, but not great. When I was in elementary school and middle school, I was already used to being at school by 8:00 on a school day. To me starting at 8:00 would be a nice change so we can be out of school closer to 3:00. That would mean we start at 8:00 and school can end at 3:02. This could provide more time after school. Unfortunately, California no longer allows high schools to begin before 8:30.

The biggest problem with last year’s schedule was when Tuesday PD and Homebase Tuesday would go back and forth every week or at random, making it difficult to know when we got out early. Luckily, this was changed for the 23-24 school year, but with a twist.

This year’s bell schedule includes major changes. The regular day schedule makes each class a bit longer by 1-2 minutes.

In this year’s schedule, we’ll always have a PD Tuesday, a change most students appreciate. Of course, now we leave school for early days at 2:38 instead of 2:04 from last year.  For better or worse, this makes the classes longer. The 2022-2023 PD Tuesday had each class at 67 minutes, and this year it’s 76 minutes. This makes it feel like a regular day without period 7, which is unfortunate, but it gets rid of the longer Homebase Tuesday, which is a net positive. 

The new Homebase Tuesday to me is awesome. We have only an an hour and four minutes for each class, and there’s no period 7. It’s beautiful. 17 minutes less of class time to boot. Something to note is that we only have Homebase once a month unless there’s something like testing. 

This year’s minimum day schedule has small changes to it as well. Each class will be 58 minutes long instead of the 45 minutes from last year. I don’t like this change because minimum day classes need that fast pace feeling instead of a long class. The dismissal is only 4 minutes later than last year, which is fair.

Finals schedule is just a long, busy day which is painful. There’s not much change at all, just additional minutes to dismissal which is now 2:21 instead of 2:13. Many students, including myself, don’t like this change, but hopefully the school can hear other voices and make more changes for next year.