Here is the letter that will be presented to Antigo School Board members. I am asking that you join us in our effort to keep our current schedule here at AHS.

To Whom It May Concern:

As a student body, we are perplexed and do not support the schedule change for the 2022-2023 year. We have all grown up during a global pandemic, and we do not need an additional change in our lives, especially one that has no clear benefit to us.

To begin, the proposed schedule extends our current schedule by 17 minutes four days a week for a total of 68 minutes. This time is seemingly reimbursed to us on Wednesdays when we are allowed to leave at 2:20 p.m., rather than 3:20 p.m. Instead of spending equal time in school to make up for our early release on Wednesday, we are, in fact, spending more time in school. While the one-hour early release may be appealing on the surface to students, the minutes are ultimately unequal. When the additional 8 minutes are split evenly between the four remaining days, we are only spending 2 more minutes in school each day. This does not provide a significant overall benefit.

Beyond the extension being unequal to students and staff alike, it’s simply not logical for numerous reasons. For example, students without a ride on Wednesdays are left to sit aimlessly in the school for an additional hour. In an ideal world, all students would use this time as a study hall. From a student perspective, we can guarantee that this time will be wasted by most as they cause distractions for the few students who would use the time for legitimate work: this will lead to more time wasted on determining disciplinary action. Furthermore, support staff will be required to babysit kids sitting in the commons instead of focusing on work that could actually improve our school. The school resource officer must also be present for this time to ensure student safety. Parents who come to pick up their children can’t simply ask their employer to leave at a different time one day a week. Appointments, such as those to doctors, orthodontists, physical therapists, and more, are often made multiple months, even a year in advance. With this extended time, families may need to already focus on rescheduling appointments for the upcoming fall to not interfere with the school’s new schedule. Finally, this shortened time will alter start times for athletic practices. If this extra hour is being used for staff meetings, staff members who graciously spend their time outside of school to coach athletics will be occupied. This results in all of the student-athletes having to wait for their coach on Wednesdays. All of these inconsistencies demonstrate that this decision creates more issues than the supposed problems it fixes. 

While numerous issues lie within the shortened Wednesday, there are even more problems with the extended schedule on the remaining days. To begin, younger children at other schools are released before AHS attendees. If these children rely on their older siblings for transportation, they will be stuck waiting at their respective schools while AHS students are still in class. By rerouting all of the busses to AHS, students with their own vehicles will have increased difficulty leaving the parking lot as they wait for the train of busses to leave. This can cause an increase in accidents on school property out of frustration. Additionally, many AHS attendees will currently ride one bus from AHS to Antigo Middle School from which they walk home: with the new bussing schedule, this is no longer an option.

This issue spreads beyond simply the student body being frustrated: it affects local businesses. Businesses that employ high school students who are not a part of the co-op program have created their afternoon schedules around their student employees with their 3:03 p.m. release time in mind. By extending the time students are in school, businesses must accommodate their schedules to fit this change. As you can imagine, this is not easy to ask of a business. If businesses choose to make the understandable decision to maintain their current schedules, AHS students will have less time to prepare for work. This could result in an increase in students speeding to work, which can lead to accidents. Additionally, businesses such as farms rely on daylight to complete their work. By keeping high school students, the only range of students within the Unified School District of Antigo that have jobs, longer in the day, local farms may not be able to provide students like us with jobs because it’s simply not plausible with the lack of daylight.

While you may think that this schedule is benefiting our test scores, we doubt it will. For one, our brains are adjusted to a 3:00 end time, meaning that we won’t be focused for those extra 20 minutes. The added stress of this new schedule and the aforementioned issues will be mentally taxing on our students. In a post-pandemic world, we have had enough inconsistency in our lives. We are asking that you consider keeping the current 2021-2022 schedule for the 2022-2023 school year. 

Thank you for your time,

AHS Student Body