Leander ISD recently announced that a legislative bill was passed that requires students to receive 75,600 minutes of instruction instead of 180 days. Because of this change, starting next semester, Vandegrift will begin five minutes earlier, at 8:40 a.m.

The decision to have Vandegrift start five minutes earlier will not benefit students or teachers.

When the school adds five minutes to the school day, it will require a complete reworking of bell and bus schedules. Each call period will have to be adjusted to accommodate for the extra time, creating confusion among the faculty and students. The buses will have to change their pickup times for each stop, adjusting for the ebb and flow of traffic during the day. The complete revision of these long established systems will only serve to confuse students from previous years and will be a big hassle for those in charge of working those systems for the sake of only five extra minutes of instruction.

Also, the earlier time will affect the flow of traffic in the morning. Students and teachers may be consistently late for weeks after the five minutes are added, due to the completely different traffic flow in the morning. The change in traffic will also affect adults commuting to their workplace. Since the school day begins earlier, traffic will build up and begin earlier than usual, causing employees to leave their homes even earlier in order to avoid the traffic and arrive at their job on time. With students and teachers having to wake up earlier to arrive at school before this traffic clog, everyone is more tired, making the entire school day more ineffective and therefore negating the benefit of five minutes of instruction.

Finally, the extra five minutes of instruction doesn’t really provide any benefit for the students. Five minutes is a negligible amount, and when spread over four class periods, it doesn’t provide much, if any, extra learning for the students. Teachers won’t be able to teach more material in the one or two extra minutes provided for each of their classes. With only five minutes, there isn’t any instruction, but there is a large amount of reworking and inconvenience for the faculty and students in order to allow those extra minutes.

Though the school day may not seem long enough for teachers and students to thoroughly cover material, five minutes is not a big enough change to rectify the problem and justify the laborious modifications made to everyone’s schedules. An effective way to use those five minutes would be to either add them to third and seventh period so that B lunch could have the same amount of time to eat as the other lunches or add them to PIT to allow a little extra study or tutorial time instead of spreading them out among all the class periods.