Every student who participates in an after school sport knows the feeling of having to plan their homework schedule around game days and practice times.  Having to procrastinate your outlining for history to the night before its due because you have a game at 6:30 tonight and you have to finish your English essay before is stressful.  This is why many student athletes feel that while they are in season, they need a study hall period that could take the place of gym class.

I play for the school’s volleyball team, we have games two or three days a week. On home games we have to be in the gym at 4:15 to help set and score for the Junior Varsity game, and then play our own game immediately following that game. This ends at eight at the earliest. On away game days, the bus to the game leaves between three and 3:30.  The bus doesn’t return to the school until after eight at the earliest.  The days that we don’t have a game, we have at least a two-hour practice.

The time athletes dedicate to their sport takes away from time that they have to do homework.  This is an issue in high schools across the country.  Many student athletes think the extra hour of physical activity every day in unnecessary when they are participating in at least two hours of practice for their sport after school.

I’m not the only athlete who thinks this way.  I talked to my team about it and we pretty much came to the conclusion that we are already getting enough physical exercise after school, so it makes sense to allow athletes this time slot to do their homework.

Senior Paige Olausen said, “Athletes need time to do homework; we are already active.  We could use the time to get homework done that we stay up late doing after practices and games.”

There are reasons that NKHS can’t just give study hall to the athletes as soon as it is requested.  Rhode Island Department of Education, RIDE, has requirements that every public school in Rhode Island must meet.  One of these is the health portion of physical education.  If student athletes weren’t taking PE, then they wouldn’t be able to get the necessary health requirement.

Dr. Denise Mancieri,  Assistant Principal of Teaching and Learning, thinks that maybe Physical Education isn’t the answer to where time should be taken away to make room for a study hall period.  Mancieri said, “The Physical Education is phenomenal, it teaches life-long health and life skills that students wouldn’t be learning if they weren’t taking health.”

Mancieri also said that this issue tends to come up every once in awhile and that if the school could offer study hall, she doesn’t understand why it wouldn’t.  What if there was another way?  I recently read in an article from The Talon,  the school newspaper of a high school in New Jersey, that schools around them allow students to occasionally cut gym class and give them the opportunity to use that time period to do homework like this.     What if NKHS tried this? Allowing their athletes to choose when they get to drop out of PE, but leave restrictions on this privilege so that the student still would meet RIDE’s requirements of gym class.  It makes sense and would make homework load so much easier on student athletes.  Most athletes would agree that having study hall as an option, even if it is just once a week, would make such a difference in getting their work done.