By Julia Balli, Copy editor
Indian Trail High School & Academy students and staff have operated under a 
traditional schedule since 2013. An average day schedule consists of seven class periods, each class period being about 50 minutes long.
Although about several years ago Indian Trail used to follow an A/B block schedule. Instead of taking several classes every day, students would attend four classes on A Day and a different four classes on B Day, and the days would switch every other day. Each class period would be about 90 minutes long.
Indian Trail has been using the traditional schedule, but is this schedule the best choice for academic performance and understanding?
“If you follow kids over the course of a school day, you’d see that they’re exhausted. The entire education system has created a pressure cooker for students and staff,” said Denise Pope, senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success, a program that promotes student well-being and engagement in school.
Pope believes that a block schedule creates a saner school day by slowing down the pace, reducing homework and freeing up more time for hands-on learning and collaboration.
“Going through the same schedule every day can get boring and tiring in my opinion, said Jocelyn Buchholtz, an Indian Trail senior. “If we were to run classes through a block schedule then it would be more similar to a college schedule and would probably encourage more kids to want to come to school.”
Another Indian Trail student, sophomore Margaret Aide, also sees greater benefits with block scheduling.
“We can actually focus on one class for longer instead of flipping between classes every day. We can actually learn more material,” Aide said.
With longer class periods, not only do students get the chance of being able to grasp classroom material at a better rate, but teachers also get more time to complete lesson plans as well as examine and re-evaluate practices.
“I think students learn more on an A/B schedule. There’s fewer transitions. For students that need to write in class; there’s a less frantic pace. It reduces student stress. Kids have two nights to do their homework for classes, and for classes that they don’t enjoy they get a break each day,” said Allison Walton, an Indian Trail AP Language & Composition teacher who has taught under both schedules.
“I never used to hear students say they were overwhelmed and up until 2 o’clock in the morning too much, but I hear it on an almost daily basis now,” Walton said.
In 2016, Racine Unified School District (RUSD) announced that its two high schools would transition over to a block schedule for the 2016-17 school year, but many students and faculty members are having a difficult time adjusting.
Members of Youth Empowered in the Struggle, a non-profit organization that fights for the betterment of education, said that it surveyed more than 1,200 students at Horlick and Park high schools and found while 52 percent like the current schedule, the majority agree a change of some kind is needed.
That change being there should be break times in the middle of classes, or taking more time to properly train staff how to work on a block schedule.
With RUSD transitioning over to a block schedule, could Indian Trail’s administration be considering a change in schedule as well?
“Truthfully, if we could figure it out, I would love to have a schedule that allowed for block and skinnies (shorter time) classes so that each subject or class could have the amount of time that would optimize learning,” said Indian Trail Principal Maria Kotz.
“Unfortunately, block schedules tend to be more expensive so that is an issue. In part, the high cost of block scheduling was the reason the district returned to a more traditional schedule some years ago,” Kotz said.
Critics of block scheduling often argue that students do not have a very long attention span, so it may be even more difficult for them to pay attention for a 90-minute class period. Critics are also concerned that if students are absent from school they may have a harder time catching up with the material that they missed in class.
Of course a school’s schedule isn’t the most important factor in a students academic achievement, but block scheduling may be the next step in increasing students attendance and comprehension in school by spending more time with teachers and having school curriculum go at a slower pace.