As Campo starts the new school year off strong, everyone gets back into the swing of things and falls into a routine. One of the things the student body has become accustomed to over the past few years is the comfortable 10 minute passing periods. However, these passing periods are an awkward length of time because they aren’t long enough for students to do the things they want to do, but they are too long for a simple walk to class. This is why they need to be shortened to five minutes.
Students use this time to chat with friends. However, the short passing period doesn’t allow students time to have lengthy conversations. If the block day passing periods were shorter, more time could be allotted for lunch, allowing students more time to eat and chat with friends. Junior Giorgia Stankus said, “We could shorten it to seven or eight minutes and then add that time on [to the lunch period] and still have time to get to class.”
Another reason students enjoy the lengthy passing periods is because they’re able to grab snacks from the vending machines in the quad. This shortened period presents an issue due to the fact that there are crowds of people waiting to get snacks.
When so many people are waiting to get food or drinks, it creates a delay. Not everyone knows what they want to eat so they spend time at the front of the line debating, which forces everyone else to have to wait longer. This results in students arriving late to class. Subtracting 5 minutes from each passing period and adding them to lunch would deter people from going to the vending machines during passing periods, and would instead cause the vending machine rush during lunch, where they would have more time and a less likely chance of being late to class.
In addition to that, most teachers don’t allow students to eat in their classes, so why go during passing periods and risk being late to class when you wouldn’t even be able to eat anyway? It makes more sense to go during lunch and be able to eat your snacks right away.
A longer lunch period would give students more time to go down to get their food. With additional time added, there wouldn’t be a huge crowd at the same time. The crowd would be spread out over the course of a longer lunch period.
Long passing periods also mean that students are waiting around for an unnecessarily long time for class to start. All sophomore Jiya Rao does during passing periods is walk to class. “I wait until there’s something to do…I’ll just hang around until it’s time.”
If longer lunches aren’t an option, shorter days could be a better solution. “I like [the longer passing periods] but on the really long days…there should be five minute passing periods so that the day doesn’t feel as long,” says freshman Hope Petersil. Long days are hard to get through as a student, especially with four 90 minute classes, not to mention after school sports.
School is long, but passing periods don’t have to be. There are much better things passing period time can be used towards. Students aren’t happy with the length, so why not fix the issue?
