Safety of the students is of utmost importance at Cherry Hill West. This year, Dr. Burns has introduced a new homeroom policy to manage the population in the lunchroom as well as in the homerooms. The policy splits up the school by class. Freshmen and Sophomores have homeroom LB1 and lunch LB2. Juniors and Seniors have lunch LB1 and homeroom LB2. It is important to note that the homerooms are assigned and students are no longer permitted to choose where to go or get a pass to another homeroom. 

Students have many issues with this policy. At the start of the year, clubs couldn’t meet during school, and homework help was limited. Dr. Burns mentioned in an interview that they were and are still working towards freeing up teachers to offer more help during the lunch periods. Currently, there are help rooms for the general subjects: Math, Science, Social Studies, and English as well as afterschool and online options. But this does not solve the issue with clubs. 

Many clubs have resorted to meeting after school, contrasting to the past two years when they could meet during either LB1 or LB2 on a selected class cycle day. This has made it more difficult for clubs to meet, considering that the students and advisors of the club have to make time after school. Many students cannot attend every or even a majority of the club meetings. 

My prediction is that club participation will be drastically lowered and the student community will be impacted. Students with after-school obligations or sports will be unable to attend many club meetings, reducing the amount of time spent bonding with peers that they may not have the opportunity to interact with normally. By splitting the lunch and homerooms by grades, not only does this prevent many potential friendships from being made, but underclassmen may lack the older sibling relationships that could be formed with upperclassmen. Instead of bringing together a community, it feels as though the students are just drifting further from one another. 

Despite all of this it is very important to remember why the homeroom policy was put in place initially: safety. In our previous years, teachers as well as kitchen staff felt unsafe during the lunch periods. This was because of the mass amounts of students hanging around in the lunch areas as well and the hallways became unregulated. Numerous fights broke out and it became difficult to locate students if needed. Dr. Burns stated in the interview that it is, “Not about punishment and more about accountability.” However, it does seem to be a punishment at some points. I believe the idea of the policy, from the information I received from many teachers and sources, was to put new rules in place and slowly give students more permissions as we show more respect to the staff, school, and each other. In the most basic form, it seems to be a good idea. I do believe it could have been done in a different way that would not just suit the staff better, but also the students. Instead of adding new rules, more effort should be put into regulating the rules already in place. There are both pros and cons to the homeroom policy, as well as room for improvement.