I am a student at Bonny Eagle High School. This year our district is cutting 28 staff members.  Many are teachers that have helped me quite a bit since I moved to MSAD 6. These teachers are getting cut because of how many students take their classes.  While trying to find out what to do I realized I needed to find out why teachers could not get students in their class.  I quickly found out what was causing this, it was not a lack of students in the school.  It was too many students in study halls.

It turns out that this quarter alone, we have 409 students enrolled in a study hall.  These study halls are not productive.  During a one hour phone call with the superintendent, he told me what everyone in BEHS already knows. Teachers read the newspaper, correct papers, and even leave the room to get ready for their next class. This is because they can't teach all of the classes that a student may need help with.    He also pointed out that students are mostly unproductive and that this needs to be changed. At BEHS, we have 1207 students of which 409 are enrolled in a study hall right now. This makes up more then 1/3 of the school population. We have late arrival and early dismissal and that makes up 119 of our study hall students.

At our May 7th board meeting a student said that you can force me into a class I don't want, but that doesn't mean I will show up or pass. Our superintendent has been pointing this out as much as possible.  However, we force students into core classes everyday in high school and we've done this from the first day a child goes to school. At BEHS when a student fails we make them take the course again and maybe get extra help.  This is just another example of forcing students into a class they don't want.

While on the phone with our superintendent, I was told that BEHS and any school I talked to would say that about 10% of the population is in a study hall. 409 is not 10%, it's 34%.  I went to test this theory and found out that at Casco Bay High School they do not have study halls.  0% of the population has free time like we have at BEHS. They don't even force students into classes, instead they offer time to work with a teacher.

I feel the only way to keep teachers is to get kids that don't want a class into these tutoring classes like Casco Bay does or into real classes.  I don't even reject early dismissal or late arrival.  I believe that we should simply limit it to 5-10% of the student population which is very close to what it is now. If the study hall policy is changed there is a significantly higher chance of saving teachers and raising class sizes to a point where fewer or no teachers will be let go.

The petition ends May 31st at 4:00pm.