These past few weeks at Ventura High School, students and staff have been experiencing “block schedule.”

Block schedule is when there are fewer periods in the day that are one hour and 45 minutes long instead of the normal one hour class time period. During these weeks, Mondays and Thursdays are two hour classes for periods one, three and five. Tuesdays and Fridays are two hour classes for periods two, four, and six, and period seven meets every day. Wednesday’s are the schedules “short days” that VHS has every Wednesday of the year.

We were curious to see if students at VHS think block schedule is beneficial or if they think it’s a bust and an undesirable method of scheduling classes. When we asked senior Katherine McKenzie on her opinion on the block schedule, McKenzie stated, “I hate it! Since I have all AP classes, I do absolutely nothing due to us already taking the AP test.” What McKenzie means by this is since her Advanced Placement classes are meant to prepare students for the AP tests that take place in May, there isn’t much to do in those AP classes for the last few weeks of school.

However, junior Katie Joyce disagrees with McKenzie on this topic. “I enjoy the block schedule because I get more done during the period and am able to get ahead in my AP classes plus I enjoy getting to sleep in,” commented Joyce. Block schedule can be enjoyable for some students because they see it as an opportunity to get more done in a class since they have more time to get work done.

In our opinion, we think block schedule is beneficial. It gives us more time to be in the classes we enjoy and an extra day to get our homework done. Block schedule also allows us to learn more about a subject in one day instead of having to break up our learning over the course of the entire week.

However, the majority of VHS students disagree with us. In a recent survey issued on The Cougar Press’s Instagram story, 63.5 percent of students that voted say they hate the block schedule. Even if this isn’t an overwhelming majority of students, it is clear that most students would prefer to not have the block schedule, and that it is, indeed, a bust.