This year’s students’ ROAR experiences varied as they were the first to see the implementation of the intervention period.

The period was designed to give an extra 30-minutes to students who need to catch up on work, study or to hear their teachers clarify curriculum. However, exploitation of the period by both teachers and students has made this an unlikely reality in many classrooms on campus between 9:07 and 9:37 a.m.

There seems to have been a misunderstanding of the period’s primary use since last fall. Some teachers prioritize mandatory attendance to extensions of their lessons, while some students with failing grades also fail to meet up with expecting teachers. Both of these misuses have contributed to the campus’ foggy understanding of what priority period is meant to prioritize.

However, some teachers and students have fallen into a steady pattern of using the time correctly, proving its implementation has done some good on campus.

Anecdotally, Integrated Math scores’ improvement can be credited to the introduction of this period and students appreciate the time to ultimately improve their grades. Seeing these benefits, ROAR’s implementation has been successful, but like with any transition, some things should be tweaked to make the period as effective as possible in the future.

The period was designed for students. The students should get to responsibly dictate how they use it. It wouldn’t make sense to create an extra 30-minute period for teachers when, on most days, they are already teaching students for 81-minute periods completely left to their jurisdiction.

The system goes: students failing a course must go to that class on that teacher’s “priority day.” (Tuesday being 1st period, Wednesday being 2nd period and so on.) However some RHS teachers will tell you that great hypothetical has not exactly been actualized. In order to combat this, all teachers should follow examples individually set this year.

Some have naturally developed a good communication system within the intervention schedule framework.

A handful of teachers send staff wide emails at the beginning of priority period each day requesting failing students by name that should be in their classroom.

At the least, implementing this expectation of teachers will hopefully begin to bridge the gap between hypothetical and actual.

Its initial purpose has always been the divine design. However, administrators may want to consider a refresher on this before the start of the next school year, as teacher and student use of the period will determine ROAR’s success in the future.