Good morning readers, it has been a few weeks since I have
graced you with my input on issues at Gilroy High School, so here
is a short recap of what has been happening lately:
Good morning readers, it has been a few weeks since I have graced you with my input on issues at Gilroy High School, so here is a short recap of what has been happening lately:
– Both the boys and the girls basketball teams were eliminated in the second round of the CCS playoffs
– The wrestling team took fourth place in the state tournament with a few individual standouts and
– Freak dancing was banned form school dances and a new “four-inch rule” was implemented.
The “four-inch rule” requires that students must be four inches away from each other while dancing at the school dances. Now, I think this could be hard to regulate, so that’s why all new prom dresses and tuxedos should be equipped with four-inch thick force fields that send out an electric shock when penetrated. That should keep those freshmen girls in line.
But I am not here to talk about freak dancing, partly because I don’t care about the policy very much, but mostly because that horse has been beaten to death on these pages and now is now resting in the graveyard along side the Gay Straight Alliance Day of Silence and the California High School Exit Exam.
Rather the subject I have come to do battle with today is the proposed new bell schedule for Gilroy High. Let me start by saying that will be long gone by the time students and teachers start moaning and groaning over a new schedule. But just because I will never look back after the last time I walk out those black prison gates doesn’t mean that I think all the remaining students should get the short end of the bell schedule stick.
The current schedule on the table has been called a ‘hybrid block’ schedule. Now all I have said about the schedule is the name and already most of the Gilroy High students will be lost in its complexity. The schedule is not a Toyota Prius, so please, how about a name that makes sense.
The idea behind this concoction is to have students attend all their classes for the first three days of the week and get out of school around 3:30pm. Already this sounds tiring and we have only made it through Wednesday – 8am to 3:30pm is insane. Why not make school an even eight-hour day? If students are forced to go to school for that long, attendance levels, especially those of students who can drive, will plummet.
Thursday and Friday would be when the “block” part enters the picture. On these two days, students will have a block schedule similar to the one now in place but they will get to leave school earlier. If this schedule is adopted, there will no longer be just white and blue days, but they will be forced to introduce red, purple, and green days, covering almost all the colors of the rainbow in one week.
This different schedule will also introduce changing lunch times, making lunch on Monday through Wednesday 12:39 to 1:12, and dining hour on Thursday and Friday 11:40 to 12:10. School Board Trustee Jim Rogers responded to this by saying it is concerning because he gets cranky when he doesn’t eat lunch on time. Well then, I guess it’s a good thing Mr. Rogers doesn’t go to GHS, because he would definitely be grumpy Monday through Wednesday, and that probably wouldn’t make for a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
Whatever the committee chooses to do about the schedule for next year will surely make somebody unhappy, it’s just a matter of who it is and how unhappy they will be. Well it won’t be me, because I won’t be there.
