A staple feature of Robinson’s IB program has been our monthly savior which we have dubbed “ACCA Days.” For years it has been a tradition that on school-wide club days, all IB students will be able to stay in their homerooms for that school day, rather than move classes every block – unless a student has a club, in which case they can come and go as they need to.

Over time, IB students and teachers alike have been able to plan and structure their workloads with this free day in mind, but as of recent, this privilege has been revoked, causing a plethora of complications for everyone at the R.

For IB students, a lack of ACCA days means that instead of staying in their homerooms, they must go to each of their blocks as if it were a normal day. However, the teachers will not be assigning work, so the day is still technically a free day. While this doesn’t seem to be so bad, the consequential problems quickly pile up.

Initially, ACCA days were removed because they supposedly took away county-required class time, as well as students were (allegedly) not being productive enough. But following in suit with the theme of this year, this solution only causes more problems – leading us to question if this is really the best way to solve the issue of unfulfilled class time? With the number of problems that students have encountered as a result of this change, many would advocate for a different approach.

“In all honesty, I don’t think there really is a solution for [kids procrastinating],” IB student Jake Hatton (’23) says, “No matter what, kids will still find a way to procrastinate during club days.”

There are two practical reasons that this change is most often viewed as counterintuitive. Firstly, having to change classes every block is simply throwing away important time. Under normal circumstances, this point would not be as significant, but with construction taken into account, students’ commutes between classes are much longer than normal: about 7-8 minutes on average compared to 4-5 minutes normally. That’s almost double the time it would normally take to change classes. With that in mind, an IB student without any clubs would change classes a minimum of 6 times a day, meaning that up to 48 minutes of the day are wasted on walking between classes.

Secondly, with all of this lost time taken into account, club days become very difficult to utilize in a productive manner. In the past, students would take advantage of these days to catch up on all kinds of work or even get ahead to relieve some of the pressure of IB. But with so much time now being lost to commuting every club day, creating a stable work environment for extended periods of work is much more difficult.

While the removal of ACCA days does technically help make up for lost class time, it simply cannot be considered the best approach. It serves as a definitive step backward for the productivity of nearly every IB student as well as many teachers and should not be a change that is easily accepted.