To make up for missed days and to make sure that students have enough hours in school Hillsborough County has decided to take away early release days. Early releases days were when students get out an hour early every Monday.

The lack of these early release days messes up administrators, teachers, and students.

Early release day were created to give teachers more time to plan for their week and grade papers and get ahead. The lack of these days make life much harder for them.

The added time on Monday also means that teachers have to plan longer lessons with less planning time. My teachers’ have said that the early release days being gone cuts into their planning time. They get longer individual planning periods in the day, but they have less time for collaborative planning within their department.

For me, early release days really mess up my practice schedule. I am on the Robinson cheer team which practices Mondays, Wednesdays, and sometimes Thursdays. A Robinson sports team regulation is that each sport must have a one hour study hall every week to raise our GPA’s. This is a good idea in theory and it really worked well with early release days because that one hour fit in perfectly with the one hour lost from school on Monday.

However, now that they are gone, the study hall is completely messed up. The study hall either extends practice an entire hour or is broken up between days of practice giving no real time for students to work.

Practice being extended an hour for me means it ends at 7:15. This practice extension takes away time to work on homework and study that I now need to do at home.

The split of study halls means 30 minutes of work time on Monday and 30 minutes of work time on Tuesday and by the time we get to the room where study hall is we barley have 15 minutes left which makes pulling out your homework almost pointless.

Early release days being gone also is just a hassle. The one hour off gave students more time to get situated, catch up on homework, and plan out their schedules before they were thrown into the rest of the week.