By: Samantha Weiss ‘14
Co-Editor-in-Chief

I cannot speak for everybody, but personally, I am not a morning person.  It doesn’t matter how much sleep I get, it could be two hours or ten and a half, but the idea of having to pry myself from my warm and cozy covers will continue to haunt me.  So, the new bell schedule has really begun to take its toll on me.
The only change, besides the actual sound of the bell, is the time it sounds in the morning.  Instead of reporting to school at 8:00 in the morning, students are required to promptly arrive at their first period classes by 7:30 a.m..  Now, most people would argue that a half an hour is not that big of a deal.  However, keep in mind that nothing else has changed.   “It makes it much more difficult to manage your time,” explains Michelle Nguyen, a senior and co. – captain of the girls’ tennis team here at Cherry Hill West.  School continues to end at 2:30 p.m..  This means that athletes still have practice until normal times.  Matches and games do not come to completion any earlier, so students do not arrive home until roughly the same time as they would have with an 8:00 a.m. start time.  Homework is still piled on, especially for those of us with a large amount of AP and Honors classes, as if we did not have an extra half an hour of school time.  At the end of the day, we do not have the luxury of going to sleep a half an hour earlier.  In my opinions, the only accomplishment of the earlier start time is its ability to deprive the high school demographic of half an hour of sleep every night.
Students are not the only ones who have been inconvenienced by the shift in schedule.  Teachers are beginning to become frustrated with the level of grogginess evident within the students in the early morning periods.  Kids are finding it harder and harder to pay close attention to the curriculum being presented to them.  Instead of absorbing the material, mathematical formulas and historical dates simply arrive at one ear and float out the other.  According to one teacher, “the students are finding it more difficult to pay attention in class because they are so tired.”  Though he has no qualms with turning his alarm back thirty minutes, he is noticing a decline in the quality of student work.  Despite the fact that the first marking period has yet to come to completion, I would all but guarantee that there will be a larger amount of lower grades, maybe even a larger pile of drop slips.