Imagine it now.

Outside, the sun is shining brightly as the wind blows softly on the vivid green trees, making the trees dance elegantly. The grass is a pure green, with yellow dandelions sprouting out through the rich soil. The sky is a beautiful, light blue. It is painted along with white clouds that dot like constellations along the sky. All you want to do is to run outside and feel the warmth of the sun on your skin. You want to celebrate the end of the school year. You want to live in the moment of the beginning of summer. But there’s a problem. You are still in school, even when you finished taking all of your finals.

Let’s be honest here. Once you finish those finals at the end of the second semester, the school year is over and the beginning of summer break begins. To have school when finals are finished up is completely pointless. Not only will the students be upset with this, but the teachers as well. No one wants to sit in school for eight hours, doing nothing, when they could be home relaxing. Especially sitting inside Bishop Noll when it feels like a hundred degrees rather than eighty-five.

Craig Stafford, principal of Bishop Noll, said, “The schedule is planned in advance, and we have to make sure we have enough days to satisfy legal requirements, and enough days built in for snow so we don’t go to school in July.”

I understand two things. I understand that the schedule is already planned and that it will be a tedious job to change it. I also understand completely for the fear that we will not have enough school days. Winter is coming upon us and along winter comes snow. And a lot of it, at that. However, with the planned multiple snow makeup days on February 16 and April 6; the all school testing that occurred on October 15 (which counted as a full day of school), and the new two hour delay schedule, we should have more than enough days. The state of Indiana states that an Indiana school is to have 180 days of school. Hopefully, we will reach that mark through this excellent source of preparing.

There is also a new system that we as a school should try out. It is called E-Learning. With E-Learning, when there is a snow day or any other type of unexpected cancel school day, students can log onto the computer and do some school assignments. Teachers post the assignments online and the students do them. It might be a video to watch or it might be some work assignments. Either way, this nifty online program counts for a school day. This will definitely help with the worry of not having the number of school days that we need. Also, it is a win, win. We use the programs on snow days and who knows, we might be out of school by May 31.

However, since we do not have this program, we must prepare without it. And in the end, mother nature has a mind of its own.

If Bishop Noll could not reach the 180 days of school, then the schedule for the end of the year finals should change. Currently, the schedule for the finals this year are Monday, June 1; Tuesday, June 2; and Wednesday, June 3. The snow makeup day is the day after the third final day; Thursday, June 4. Instead of having finals from Monday through Wednesday, it would make much more sense to have finals moved back a single day to Tuesday through Thursday. In that way, students have Monday to speak with their teachers and ask any valuable questions they have before finals. Also, there is that one extra day where they could use any last minute studying.

So, in the end, this is a pretty good idea.

We fill in the extra school days if we need to; there would be an extra day to study for finals; and after we finish our last final, we can go home and soak up the sun.