There are only two possible situations in which a person’s favorite day of the week is Wednesday. Exhibit A, you aren’t actually a person, you are a camel and you love to prance around the office sharing your love for “HUMP DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!” Exhibit B, you are a student at Libertyville High School and Wednesdays cook up exactly what the doctor ordered: some extra sleep.
Contrary to popular belief, the beloved LHS tradition of weekly Wednesday late starts wasn’t started with the intention of giving students more sleep. The driving force behind the late starts, according to Assistant Principal Mr. Ray Albin, was to create PLCs, or Progressive Learning Communities. The PLCs meet every week from 7:30 to 8:30 to do things like go over lesson plans, set the curriculum and write up tests.
“Basically we needed dedicated work time, weekly dedicated work time, for all of our teachers and staff to do some of the things that they are being asked to do,” said Mr. Albin. “That is from a district perspective and state perspective: working on curriculum, working on assessments, working on instruction. We wanted these things to be more collaborative than what we currently had. With teacher schedules, sometimes you have free periods with other teachers in your department, sometimes you may not.”
In the past, late starts were more sporadic, about once a month or less. They gave the teachers ample amount of time to meet; however, the timing just didn’t play out as well as they hoped. The teachers had time to plan what they needed but the meeting times were too spread apart. Thus, weekly late starts were introduced starting in fall 2011.
“It is nice we get see each other on a regular basis,” said Algebra II teacher Mrs. Hillary Gooris. “That way we can touch base weekly, rather than once a month. The regularity of it is helpful.”
Mrs. Gooris also credits that regularity to aiding in the construction of a new curriculum and revamping the old one.
“Right now we have a new curriculum so we talk about timing for it [and] the best ways to pace it so that maximum learning can occur,” added Mrs. Gooris. “That is with a new book. If it was an old book, we would take old lessons or old concepts and share different ways to teach it to improve our lessons. Also we can evaluate how our classes and our students are doing. If they are understanding the material or, if not, what we can do to make it better in the future.”
On the flip side, late starts can present versatile options for students. If, for example, a student doesn’t want to miss class for a dentist appointment, they can do it before school on Wednesday. Students can also save a little homework for the morning and do it in a resource area, like the MASH and Testing Center, which open at 6:45 like normal days, or Write Place and the Library, which open at 7:30. There is also the more obvious route where students just use the time milk every second of sleep they can get from the 8:50 start.
“I actually eat breakfast because I usually don’t have time to eat breakfast,” said sophomore Brandon Tang. “It’s a good middle, you know. Mondays suck, Tuesday ‘oh, late start tomorrow,’ Wednesday is late start, Thursday ‘it’s Friday tomorrow’ and Friday is Friday.”
Though there is in fact time to get extra sleep, that isn’t always the outcome for the busy Libertyville students.
“I definitely stay up later,” said senior and avid sleeper Alli Brucato. “I tell myself ‘Oh it’s a late start!’ and I end up getting way less sleep [than a normal school day]. A lot of people would do that too because they have a similar mindset of ‘Oh its a late start, I can stay up later, watch another episode.’”
For students, the late start isn’t just about the extra sleep either. Many also find joy in the fact that when they get out of bed, the sun is actually shining instead of sleeping. Others find the most satisfaction in the shortened periods, just 40 minutes rather than the regular 50.
“The fact that it is light outside [when I wake up] puts me in a better mood,” continued Brucato. “It seems like everyone is in a better mood. Even though it isn’t that much of a shorter day, you can tell yourself that it is shorter.”
To the delight of the student body, late starts won’t come to the dreaded early end that they normally do this year. In previous years, the last late start has been in April; this year, they will extend through the end of the school year.
“This is our first year that will continue that every Wednesday late start all the way basically to the end of school,” said Mr. Albin. “In the past three years, we stopped in May because of AP testing. This upcoming year we are going to continue all the way through. Our teachers asked for time to continue working in their PLCs on projects that they had been working on all year. They basically said ‘Stopping in April, that’s great but we are missing a whole month. It’s hard to think about wrapping up the year in April.’ So the district has allowed us to continue them through May.”
