Loudspeaker announcements and yelling kids; personally, if I have class starting at eight, I want to be sleeping for that extra 40 minutes, not wandering the halls.

Starting late on Wednesdays should be great, right? The fact is, people can sugarcoat just about anything to make it sound great, it just depends on what is put into people’s heads, and what is left out.

The school will tell you that it will be great. They’ll tell you there will be 40 minutes for teacher collaboration and you will be able to catch up on work, but (and there’s usually a “but”) they did fail to make a few things widely known.

The buses coming at the same time and our awesome crossing guard having to leave at her regular time make it seem like this plan wasn’t thought through very well. That’s not all, while we are waiting at school for an hour, it’s a closed campus. Once you arrive at WS, you are stuck there until the final bell rings at 2:10.

On the WS website, it states clearly that students will have this time to work independently in supervised areas, but anyone walking through the hall from 6:50-8:00 on a Wednesday morning can tell this isn’t exactly true. I wouldn’t mind having some extra time to do work, but with all the classrooms closed for teacher collaboration, sitting on the hallway floor with a pencil in hand isn’t too appealing.

As annoying as having crowded halls as study rooms is, I think anyone who has tried to come to school when our regular crossing guard isn’t working knows that this is the worst part of these late starts.

Around 7:20 our crossing guard, Lanora Goral has to leave to attend to her duties at other schools, and is replaced by a police officer. Police officers are very good at the jobs they do, but nobody can be as good of a crossing guard as Mrs. Goral.

I personally just don’t get it. Why can’t we do it the way that Lake Braddock does, and get out early on one day? Then people are free to leave and do as they please. Heck, I’d even prefer to get out five minutes earlier every day rather then start late only one day!

People can twist things to make them seem good and people can make others think what they want, but if you think about this, it just doesn’t seem to make sense.

Late start or early starts, crossing guard or no crossing guard, this is a decision that’s been made. We just need to stick out the year and make the best of it.