There is something about going to Hometown Cafe with your friends or getting Hometown before the school day that always makes the start or end of a week a little bit better. 

This year, the school will only have one late start, and multiple early dismissal days during the year. 

Instead of having a Friday/Monday late start early arrival, they are happening on Thursdays and Fridays, sporadically throughout the year. 

With the first late start/early dismissal day coming up on Oct. 13 and 14, it marks the end of our first quarter. This is the last late arrival we will see this school year. The rest of the days will be Thursday’s and Friday’s early dismissals, which some students and staff have mixed feelings about.

“I really enjoyed them the old way we had it because the weekend feels a day longer because you have half a day on [Friday and Monday] framing it,” says Senior Kyra Powell.

Powell also mentioned the previous schedule mae the weekends feel longer.

“I felt relaxed because I got to do something fun on Friday and then I got to sleep in a little on Monday,” said Senior Kyra Powell. 

Powell does not understand the purpose of changing the schedule, when the original calendar already worked so well. 

“I don’t really understand the point of having an early release on Thursday, and then coming back to school and doing it again. You might as well just have a full day on Thursday and have Friday off… So I think early dismissals are definitely better.” Powell said. 

On the contrary of the lack of effectiveness on the late starts giving little time to “sleep in” some students believe that the early dismissals as a whole are just that much better. 

“From my experience, people like early dismissals a lot better than late arrivals,” said senior Nicholas Wissman.

While students seek out hanging out with friends and not going to a full day of school, it doesen’t seem to affect teachers all that much. 

“Either way we would be here, here, doing the same meetings, the same information. What is different is the addition of the anchor day….Now departments have four full days to do more in depth meetings and go off campus to visit other schools. And so we’ve been given more time with that addition of anchor days,” said art department chair Alicia Landes. 

To teachers, the anchor day has proven to be more helpful than the added/change in half days. 

“Part of the [early dismissals] is to allow staff to have professional development time together. It allows the faculty staff to collaborate. Overall, it’s about best practices and curriculum, extracurricular planning, students support all of that. This year with the introduction of the personal learning time on anchor days, each department has two full days per semester [for PD.] So before we were doing the late and early and that was what they were using it for. They still are because we have some of those days, but now with anchor days that is their time [to have meetings,]” said Dubravec. 

Dubravec sees the benefit for teachers but also the benefit for the students and the learning with the weekends. 

“I think overall it’s benefiting kids. So the switch actually is to be consistent with the blue, green and anchor day schedule, so many teachers set their lesson planning to match the blue and green pairing that week. [Teachers] want to make sure that those classes keep pace in the same week. Rather than having instruction interrupted by a weekend, the pairing days take place in the same week, rather than split by weekend.” Dubravec said. 

Reglardless of their reasons, the calendar committee have chosen to make the half days on Thursday and Friday and while we don’t know what the future might looking like for now we can look forward to more lunches with friends, at Hometown.