By Kelsey Baez

Lowell, MA- Students wake up and go to school in the morning walking like zombies.  They drag themselves into their first period class and struggle to focus on their learning.

In recent years administrators listened to suggestions from teachers about how to solve a common problem in other high schools.

First period teachers notice how the class is always half asleep and not really paying attention, according to many Lowell High School teachers.  

Meanwhile, last period teachers notice how the students are always wild and disengaged at the end of the day.

“Students process information at different times of the day,” said Dr. Roxane Howe, Discipline and Operations Specialist at LHS.

There is a trend in secondary education in which many high schools are doing schedule changes to meet the needs of a teenager’s life including starting the day later.

LHS students got their new 2015 schedules in the mail this year and many of the students were confused.  The students didn’t know they were part of a radical change to schedules at LHS where students swapped periods for part of the week.

Mondays and Tuesdays were normal but Wednesdays through Fridays the first class and last class would switch.  The remainder of the schedule, Period 2 through Period 6, remain the same.

Alexarey Duplantis, a senior at LHS, only had one word to describe the new schedule “terrible.”  She felt it was confusing.

Other students recognized certain benefits to the change.

“It’s alright because I can hold off homework that’s supposed to be due,” explained Luis Greene, LHS Senior.

Still others have their own theories about the change like Jerriline Cisco, another LHS Senior, who said, “They did the switch because of so many tardies and absences so now with the switch we’ll have more flexibility with our attendance abilities.”

Most students don’t know the real reason why the schedule changed. They claim it’s pointless to speculate without really knowing the facts to it.

The whole idea comes from research about how students learn at different times and considers LHS’s flexibility to move the schedule around, but only so much because of lunch periods, according to Dr.Howe.

In reality LHS staff is just trying to get more students’ minds functioning earlier in the day, she added.

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