When asked “What would you do if you were principal for the day?,” many students responded to the issues of being a high school student. A big aspect of the answers was the timing of everything as most students are in: clubs, sports, volunteering, working part time, and other extracurricular activities.
Some students’ responses were: giving out less homework, getting rid of phone pockets for time management skills, fixing the lunch tables to provide comfort, getting better lunch food, and enforcing the rules of the bathrooms. There were many suggestions to improve the school’s structure by the student body such as, fixing the water system and four day weeks.
The substantial time crunch was a big factor as many upperclassmen want a new timing system, like college, for homework because they are almost there. Taking that into consideration, the flexing periods are important as the students must juggle all different activities.
Though the suggestions were just spewed out, the students have spoken on the problems giving the school something new for the administrators to think about. Not only was this student body composed of all of the different grades in high school, they were also very observant of the problems within the school.
Meanwhile, teachers’ responses differed more, with less agreement. One teacher said nothing needed to be improved, and another teacher suggested more interaction with students and the classroom environments. The faculty had a difficult time answering this question, more than the students, due to the fact that they had never been asked that. This was very surprising because most of the faculty has worked here for years, and apparently have never received, necessarily, the control to impact the school as a whole.
Mr. Liporto, the vice principal, kindly responded to my question in contrast to my article. The question was “If you could change anything about the school, what would it be?”, and the response was giving the students more diverse options for electives. He continued by saying there’s still a lot of different things we need to improve at the school.
This is the proof that has propelled the idea that there’s not enough communication between students, faculty, and administrators to improve the school system.
Some solutions to this could be: a more than once a year anonymous survey, or on the first Wednesday of every month a panel of students could give a list of things we could improve, or meetings with the administration, the athletic director, faculty, and students to talk about the present problems freely.
While this could just be a one school issue, it is sadly not, as talking with other peers from different schools this issue is still apparent.
How can we all innovate and communicate more effectively in schools?
