The school district has made the official call to switch to a 7 period schedule, disregarding any concerns of the public. 

Over the last month, us students have sent emails, conducted studies, interviews students, and doing the hard work the school lacked itself to do over the last years. We've found blatant lies within what the district had said. 

1) We asked them to conduct a study over students across the school to see who actually didn't want this. This survey has yet to be made public at all, with the presentation at the Board Of Education meeting ignoring this completely. They also directly told concerned parents that "the results were overwhelmingly negative, but it doesn't matter because students don't know what they are talking about." They say they are taking the voices of students in consideration, but it reflects towards us as if they are ignoring the fact that we care 

2) The school district has been caught lying to students to persuade them that the best schedule will be fine. One such student reported that they met with the principals and counselors to discuss their schedule and the change with their music program. The admin. Told them that all the directors were fine with in and that things were good for the band. However, this student decided to actually ask the directors and found that this whole thing was a lie in the end. Two directors didn't even know, and the ones that knew didn't even like it. 

3) De-incentivising participation in clubs and classes: This school continues to push that students don't have to do everything their freshman and sophomore years, yet many students chose this because they enjoy taking a lot of classes and getting stuff done before senior year so that they don't have to take their random credits those years. The schools solution is that students can take things years apart and no consecutively. However, this incentives students to break the success and value of having classes year by year (For context, they want students the students that  take Spanish 1 in 8th grade to take it later, not the next year). This idea completely negates the idea that students will foster better education when they lose that back to back connection that currently exists. 

4) The solution they failed to see. From a students perspective, regardless of when this decision was made, a better option exists specifically allowing for time to stress our concerns and involve the public. What should have been done was to give us one more year with 8 periods because the school knows we have concerns. What's left now is a student body wanting to find a solution, parent concerns found, and a year to figure out direct answers. Spending years researching the bell schedule in private and assuming it will be fine doesn't offer solvency when the way students figured this all out was this very petition. 

So what can we do now? 

Reach out to the administration. Concern your voices. We students shouldn't have our voices thrown under the rug, because when your own student body finds that this "minority of concerned students" affects more than half of the students body, it should be considered a majority issue.