Stress and school go hand in hand, and the less stress the better. AISD isn’t helping its students by making the six weeks shorter. Instead it’s makes students even more stressed out than they need to be.

Deadlines cause stress. The end of the six weeks is a deadline to get our grades up, and this six weeks is only about five weeks long which obviously gives us less time to figure out how to fix our grades. This only hurts our students’ mental health. Putting students into these stressful situations can cause depression, anxiety, insomnia, and other forms of stress induced symptoms. In a survey conducted by the American Physiological Association, 31 percent of teens report feeling overwhelmed as a result of stress, 30 percent say that they feel sad or depressed as a result of stress, and 36 percent report feeling tired or fatigued because of stress. By putting our students into situations such as this one, this can damage their mental health.

There are also physical dangers to stress, which are considerably worse than the mental consequences. Stress could lead to headaches, heart disease, obesity, and even diabetes, and there are significantly more physical effects of stress than listed. This is another big reason why we need to avoid short six weeks.

To make this situation even worse, we have finals directly after this six weeks, which makes two things students need to worry about. Finals are when student stress is at its highest, and combining this fact with the short six weeks, you get a really overwhelmed student body. It’s really unfair to the students. I know that this situation is currently unavoidable due to Thanksgiving Break and other reasons, but I offer a solution to this problem.

Instead of making this six weeks shorter, why not shorten either of the six weeks before that? This eliminates the problem of students stressing about the short six weeks and the final exams, but on the flip side, students will have to stress about another six weeks being extremely short. Another potential solution would be to push back finals and winter break, and have the break begin later that same week. While there are probably better ideas than mine, they’re still an improvement from the situation that we, as students, are in right now. I know that it is too late to fix this problem for this year, but these are potential answers to this problem next year.

Stress needs to be avoided, and to fix this six weeks is a step in the right direction. To fix this problem, it means improving students’ mental health, which should be one of the district’s top priorities. This could, and should, be fixed. If it isn’t, it could certainly affect the academic performance of all our students.