While the administration has hounded students about signing up for academy sessions this year, the number of useful and available alternate academy offerings is lacking.

Instead, while students get increasingly frustrated with limited Academy spaces that serve as alternate options to going to teachers’ academies, the administration has focused on problems such as how students are spending their academy time, including a strict no phone policy in the library and teachers tagging students for their academies when needed.

I have seen students unable to find a place to collaborate with peers on school work when the multi-use room is full.

Students are often looking for a study hall to work with people on group projects. However, the library is unavailable to work in groups, and the multi-use room quickly fills up.

I have sat on my computer on Wednesday mornings, monotonously refreshing the FlexTime App, hoping to catch the moment someone dropped out of an academy.

The multi-use room is often the place where students go when they have nothing to do and want to just hang out. It is unfair that these students take the spots of other students who truly need time to collaborate with classmates.

There need to be more academies that serve a similar purpose to that of the multi-use room, allowing students to interact. I believe an additional collaboration space will prove beneficial to students in the next school year.

Sophomore Haley Hartman said, “I feel like, with the limited academy offerings, you can’t always do exactly what you want to do. Most teachers offer their academies for specific things, so it would be nice to have another study hall to go to because the Library and MUR fill up so fast. I would rather be able to do homework for the classes I want and study for the tests I want,” she said.

There needs to be another academy offering where students can collaborate with other students without the high noise levels and distractions of the MUR or the strict no talking, no phones as resources, and no partner studying that accompanies the library.