Let Students Have a Choice!
Let Students Have a Choice!
Ash Freyer
It is no surprise that schools love to make decisions without asking for the students' opinions. The Flagstaff Unified School District has very recently started to make decisions that heavily impact the students without consulting them or the parents about them first, leading to confusion, and overall resentment against the school board and district. They did not give the students any chance to have their opinions voiced or even give them an option to vote in the things that are changed even though it affects the students more than the people inside of the school board.
At the beginning of 2025, the Flagstaff Unified School district decided to change the time that the schools ended and started, going from the original 8 AM to 2:30 PM to starting at basically 8:50 and ending at 3:20 PM. It may seem minimal, but it has drastically affected the lives of many students. One sophomore student, when asked about how the district's choices have affected them, said, "I don't think they really cared about our opinion, I dunno, I just wish it would go back to how it was.” This quote shows that a lot of students wish that they had more of a voice in what the district decides to do, regarding their education, because it often seems like the district only cares about doing what they want to do.
The district changing the start and end times has made it so that a lot of students have to get up way earlier in order to take the public bus because their families can no longer take them to school. The school district said they changed the time to allow students to get more sleep, but in actuality, a lot of students have to get up even earlier to take the public bus, and now have their practices in the morning instead of them being in the afternoon, so really all that the district has done is make getting to school harder for students and make some students get even less sleep than before. Many students just want to have their old schedule back, and a lot of teachers do too. Now that school ends later the teachers have to stay even later too. A lot of the teachers work second jobs, and working later can make it harder for them to get to their other jobs and get other work done.
Overall, the decisions that the district makes seems to affect everyone but the people who are in the district higher ups (who make the decisions). The teachers and students are forced to deal with the district’s decisions when they did not even want the change to happen in the first place. The choices that the district makes also affects the parents because some of them can’t take their kids to school anymore because of their own schedules, so their kids are either forced to take the early bus to school, or find some other way to get there that isn’t as safe.