With over 2,400 students and 10 buildings spread out across acres of campus, It takes approximately 6 minutes and seventeen seconds to get from the 300 building to the 700 building while speed walking. To add, imagine having to go from the 3rd floor of each building all while teachers expect us to use the bathroom within that time. It is unreasonable and unfair. 

So, when the state of Florida announced cutting class transition time for the 2022-2023 school year, from 10 minutes to 7 minutes, students were understandably upset. The idea behind cutting class to class time was to hopefully get more learning time and yes they might have achieved that, but at what cost. 

According to SBHS administrator, “the school had three choices to choose from to get more class time: cutting lunch time, extending the school day by five minutes or, shortening switching times by three minutes to get to each class.” 

Personally, I believe that an extra three minutes per class is not going to make a huge difference. Yes, at the end of the school year it all adds up but honestly, what more can you do with an extra three minutes. You may get more class time but what are the consequences because of it? You’re more at risk of getting a detention since after 3 tardy passes you get a detention on your 4th, and you lose valuable class time waiting in lines. You could be on your way to class and only be 2 minutes late, in my opinion it’s not necessary to send someone down when instead you could miss 2 minutes of class time and let them in or miss 20 minutes because you had to wait in a 20 foot line.

I understand the school needs to be more strict so students are serious about getting to class on time, but not to the point where you shut the door even if you see someone walking down the hall. Which is something that students go through everyday and don’t deserve when they genuinely want to learn. Some students even experience having to run down the hall and having the door shut in their face while the morning announcements are still going on. 

Like mentioned before, one of the other options that BCPS could have chosen was cutting down on lunch time and I think that’s more reasonable than switching time. Most students are done with their lunch in 15-20 minutes and yes the school lunch lines are really long, but there are many things we could do about shortening the lunch lines. One simple thing we could do to shorten lunch lines is hire more cafeteria workers.

If there are more people serving food the lines will certainly go faster. Another solution is to open more lunch lines, by opening more lunch lines it reduces the amount of people in each line which will definitely shorten time in all. All in all shortening lunch is  still more reasonable than shortening switching times. Slowly the school lunch lines are getting shorter and shorter the farther we get into the school year so students don’t really need 30 minutes for lunch.