Once again, the bell schedule is changing.
Monarch will return to a seven-period day for the 2022-23 school year, with most days having 52 minute class periods and a 30-minute lunch based on students’ 4th or 5th period class. The late start on Wednesday will stay along with an additional access time, making classes start at 10:30.
The sudden change is actually not sudden at all. “In the state of Colorado, we have to meet certain parameters of instructional hour,” Principal Neil Anderson said. “[This year] we meet the number of hours required within a year. We were a little short on the instructional hours during the week.”
This deficit in weekly instructional hours is why the schedule must change, according to Anderson. Even though he and the other BVSD principals were made aware of this requirement fairly recently, Anderson didn’t hesitate to make sure every student has the appropriate amount of learning minutes.
Although there is a justified reason for changing the schedule for the fifth time in five years, the reaction is not what Anderson expected. He ran the new schedule by both students and teachers before releasing it to the entire school, but not everyone loved it. “I wanted a longer lunch,” Kierra Kernan ‘24 said. “I was hoping there would be more access time.”
On the other hand, teacher Melissa Peterson doesn’t have much of an opinion. “Tell us when to get here and we’ll be here and tell us when to go home,” she said. “Other than that, it doesn’t really matter.”
Despite the change being necessary, Anderson tried to give students as much freedom as possible. “It got to a level that we were looking at passing times to be four minutes, not five,” Anderson said. That idea did not come to pass, as he understands that every minute in the school day counts. His hope is that soon students, parents, and teachers will understand the reasoning and not let this new schedule break their stride into a new year.