UPDATE: Block days have been canceled for the rest of the semester. The last set of double block days was in March.

Principal Dr Jeffrey Stichler said he decided to cancel the remaining block days due to the complaints from teachers. These block days were implemented into the school year to help science classes with long labs and other classes with standardized testing.

“Many teachers were concerned that having 110 minutes for a class and then not having class the next day was actually making it harder for students to learn new concepts,” Stichler said. “Also, students absent that day were losing two days of instruction. We plan to have some block days again next year, just not as many.”

ORIGINAL: A petition has been circling around school in hopes to end block days. The petition, titled “NO MORE BLOCK DAYS”, has over 90 signatures from students in all grades.

It began with a signature from freshman Jackie Campos. She started the petition in hopes that Principal Dr. Jeffrey Stichler would see it and stop implementing block days.

“They give us a lot of extra work, and tests,” Campos said.

Junior Evelyn Gonzalez said she does not not like block days because of the lack of back-to-back classes.

“It’s not that helpful because you could spend a long time on a certain class but two days later you’re not going to remember it as good as if you would do it everyday,” Gonzalez said. “Just the fact of being in a class for two hours is exhausting and you’re just trying to go to the next class. Most people are tired and sitting down for that long is not good.”

Despite many people being against block days, there are still a few who believe block days are not necessarily a problem. English teacher Jeffrey Matthews is one of them.

“I think that when kids are absent, or sick, or for other reasons it can be stressful for them missing block days because they’re missing so much from that class,” Matthews said. “But it kinda balances out if you think of a block day as two classes put together. I mean, on a block day yeah you’re missing three or four long classes, but it kinda balances out because on a normal day you’re missing seven different class, so I don’t think it’s that much more make-up work honestly.”

There are currently four more sets of block days left, the next one happening next Wednesday and Thursday.

Stichler was one of the ones that thought that the double block will be a good idea for the students when they started in the 2017-2018 school year.

“The double block days give students the chance to be in a classroom for two hours instead of one,” he said in a December 2017 Prowler article. “It really helps with projects and taking the benchmarks test.”