Senior year seems to fly by, especially when a shorter schedule second semester is usually the norm. So, what if there was a world in which we didn’t have shorter schedules second semester of our senior years? I know it sounds like it would be awful, but it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing to have more requirements for senior year than just an english and government class.

It may seem like because we are a smaller school, we start off at a disadvantage when going off to college. One major reason for that is less classes offered than most other schools and no AP or Honors courses that count towards a GPA higher than 4.0. With more basic requirements, we would be able to compete with students from larger schools by expanding our math and english departments and possibly with the addition of AP courses. Though it would mean having a full schedule all of senior year, or at least having 5 hours of the day for all seniors, it would open our realm of possibility for the next level of education.

Of course this means the shortened schedule would be much harder to come by and only students that work hard from the very beginning of high school would be able to complete these higher requirements. A student not taking advantage of higher classes or failing multiple classes would then put themselves behind, and that consequence would be a harder schedule for senior year. The only true downfall would be the less amount of people able to shorten their schedules second semester. Although, it could be just the inspiration needed for students to work harder throughout all of high school- not just when they see fit.

Thus, it would allow our school the ability to compete academically with 6A schools that have many more resources than ours. As of right now, many seniors that have slacked off all of high school and only brought down class GPAs or test scores currently have schedules that only include a gym class, TA hour and English. Allowing them the same reward as students that have worked hard in all subjects all four years doesn’t seem very fair to the students that have worked so hard. Who knows? Maybe in the future, our school will require Composition as a class taken by all seniors, or at the rate the middle school math is going, we might have to expand up to Calculus II and have one more college class out of the way before we graduate.