On Monday December 17th, students of SJHHS began the revised early out Schedule. The early out day originally ended at 1:30 and now has been changed to 2:13 PM. Each class has added an additional eight minutes and lunch has been decreased by five minutes, which means it’s now only a half an hour long. Many may ask the question, why hasn’t anyone thought of changing the schedule in previous years? According to Tom Ressler, principal at SJHHS, “ It didn’t need to be changed in previous years, because of the different furlough days assigned to students.” What we found out this year was that we needed a total of 64,800 minutes in a school year. These minutes were then lowered to 63,000 due to budget cuts. The school figured out that our school was about 900 minutes short of this required time limit. If we had not made changes to the bell schedule, the district would have been fined close to $900,000. This is the same for every school in our district that was short on minutes. “This is permanent for the rest of the school year. In August we will meet with teachers, review the schedule, and see if there needs to be any changes in it,” said Ressler. We are not the only school in the district that was short time. Ressler stated that, “Capo Valley just added some minutes to their day, due to the fact that they were short on teacher-student contact time.” What this means is that teachers are required to have a certain amount of time with their students and are not allowed to exceed that limit, and it was that contact time that Capo Valley was short on.