Carter Huff Asks: Do Administrators Consider All Sides Before Making A Decision?

Every student, at any school across the world, has to deal with decisions and rules set or made by administrators and faculty that are apparently best for the school and its students. The problem is, when these rules and decisions are conjured up during the many after school meetings the faculty sit through, choices are often made without student body input, or notice. Therefore, when new rules are released and enforced, it leaves students in dismay leading them to call the rules “unfair” or “stupid” or saying things like “we could do this stuff last year, why’d it have to change?”
Often times though, new rules or changes are put in place due to an incident that had brought previous concern, and problems administrators don’t want to deal with in the future. An example of such occurrence is when the Urbana Park District, acting as the administrators, remodeled the Carle Park Pavilion, due to graffiti and other forms of tagging that caused visual obstruction.

When the remodeling was complete all entrances into the structure were closed off, and video cameras were placed to deter any shenanigans, the actions taken by The UPD act as the rules made by administrators.

However, many people used the pavilion to relax, read, study, play music, and occasionally even the homeless used it as shelter. As a result, when the UPD closed off all entrances many people were unhappy. My point is, when officials make sudden changes to previously unchanged things it usually catches people off guard and the officials do not explain why they decided to make the change.
In the case of Urbana High School, with the arrival of new principal Matthew Stark, there have been many rule changes, and rumors say there are many more in the books with plenty of new rules being formulated. Examples of such rumors confirmed by teachers, are apparently splitting up the original single hour of off campus lunch during 6th hour, and splitting it up into spreading between 4th,5th, and 6th hour. Already, I have heard hundreds of complaints, and questions about why this will be happening. Apparently, the problem to Mr. Stark is that with Juniors and Seniors just having 6th hour lunch, it makes it very difficult for the individuals who schedule the students classes to fill in gaps in a students’ class schedule. Spreading off campus lunch for upperclassmen will evidently make scheduling, and class requests easier to fill.
The question I have is, 6th hour off campus lunch has existed for 14 years and there haven’t been any major incidents to cause the existence of 6th hour to be an issue. Scheduling has worked relatively well for those 14 years, so why change? The argument of many students is that splitting off -campus lunch into three periods, eliminates many opportunities for friends to go out and eat together or even see each other for the entire day. When the current 6th hour, you can see friends you usually don’t see throughout the rest of the day. Another argument comes from upperclassmen that are concerned they will have 4th hour lunch, especially on Wednesday. They fear they will not be even hungry for lunch, counting they had just eaten breakfast less than three hours earlier, and then by the end of the day they will be hungry.
Another change possibly being made next year, a rumor that has been confirmed by teachers, is that you will have to personally set up a meeting with Mr. Stark with your parents to ask for no 8th period class. Once again, optional 8th hour has existed for many previous years. The argument of the administrators is that we need all the schooling we can get, and that not having an 8th hour is just useless time that we could be using to learn. However, the argument of the students, an obvious argument at that, is the credit requirement to graduate high school is to have 45 credits. The majority of students, by Junior year have enough credits already that having an 8th hour isn’t necessary to meet the graduation requirement. Point made by students is that not having an 8th hour allows students down time before homework time, or athletic practices, or jobs students have. Being a student athlete myself, having downtime before practice is a very nice privilege, and I think that not having an 8th hour should be an option for all students.
My entire point is, administrators, before making permanent decision, should consult students to get their piece of mind. When administrators make sudden decisions and changes to rules of course students will be upset, and confused to as of why changes are being made, so to avoid this, consult the students.

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Carter Huff

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