As the final bell rings at Bowie at 4:35 p.m in the afternoon, 3000 kids are let out into soon-to-be 5:00 p.m. traffic. The campus has two parking lots including the Bethany church next door where half of the students park. This leads to mass amounts of students clumping together onto two roadways in the afternoon.
Once you get out of the campus the traffic on the roads outside isn’t much better. The roadways become overcrowded at this time because most people are leaving work around 5:00 p.m. This poses a problem because many students have extracurricular activities and jobs to get to and, in my experience, I will get home thirty to forty-five minutes after school lets out.
This proves to be a big issue when it comes to studying for upcoming tests or quizzes. Whether students are at dress rehearsals or scrimmages, most after-school activities end later and later as the year progresses. When students get home late they have to study for countless hours after the activity in order to be successful in their academics the next day. This means that the extra sleep most individuals are supposed to be getting the following morning ends up being minimal. This leaves most students who do outside activities with a difficult choice. Stay up and lose sleep to possibly succeed on their exam, or take the sleep in order to better focus the next day or their test.
Most would argue that the higher school levels need to start later. This is due to the fact that high schoolers getting more sleep generally looks when officials are discussing school times. 5:00 p.m. traffic can pose an issue to any school getting out, regardless of the size of the student body. This is especially a problem for the schools in larger cities that have very high enrollment numbers per school. With the current schedules of many schools, extracurricular activities are pushed to later in the day, which means students get home at late hours and have limited time to complete homework.
Alternatively, high school students may go from after-school activities to a job and then have no time left for the actual school work. Students traveling by car will benefit because there will be more focused routes to their place of work or after-school activity due to the structural changes to the campus itself. This would help students get to jobs or other activities more timely so they don’t have to miss hours and or practice time. This additionally helps individuals get home more efficiently to get general school studies done.
An alternate solution to this issue would be to better manage the structural situation of the campus itself. If the traffic was managed better the individuals who need to be directed to a certain roadway could be better placed throughout the campus during dismissal times. Directing the students who need to be going in a certain direction can ease the burden of the traffic and cut down on time lost waiting on school grounds. The more effective routing of traffic getting off campus can help students who are struggling to get home and to jobs promptly.
Changing the start times wouldn’t be a practical solution for high schoolers because the traffic is an imminent problem in either scenario with so many individuals driving on campus. Even if the start times were changed you would have to deal with the traffic on campus until you reach the connecting roadways at any hour of the day. This means the only worthwhile solution would be to install another exit going out through the neighborhood on the westward side of Bowie. This would better distribute the traffic on campus and make sure that students who need to be going in a certain direction can be prioritized. As opposed to all of the student traffic being funneled out onto a single roadway.
Overall, school should be let out at an earlier window for the betterment of student’s academic, social, and extracurricular endeavours. When forced to endure a late release straight into outside activities this makes it hard for students to manage their time effectively. The argument can be made that high school students need extra sleep in the morning, but this in reality creates a push-back of the schedule that forces them to do everything in their lives later. This negates the intended time of extra rest that the later start and in turn finish seek to create.
In many cases, this seemingly helpful accommodation is actually creating a net loss in sleep time for students. Clearly, the late start time that high school students are deceivingly granted, creating a later release time does more harm than good for students.
