For literacy this week we were giving a fake article that stated that school hours would be 9 – 5PM instead of the usual 9 – 3PM.
We were told to either write a fake letter to the MP or create a leaflet stating your opinion on the whole situation.
I Chose to write a fake letter to the MP. Addison and Emma read my letter and said that I had a good layout, good punctuation, that I got straight to the point, and that I suggested further action.
Kia ora Reuben Davidson.
I am George Bodger from Christchurch east. I am writing to talk about how extending school hours is a bad idea for both students, school staff and parents.
Extending school hours would add an additional 10 hours weekly of school for students and teachers, yearly there would be + 270 hours (This is including the 1 week holidays instead of the usual 2 weeks) . This would eventually lead to teachers and students to burn out.
Children are already tired by 3:00PM. If we added 2 more hours of school, would the additional 2 hours of more work even be good quality? Probably not. So even though the statistics say our academic success would be better it could be partially false.
Also this may increase pressure on us kids, because we would be expected to do so much more work and for all of it to be high quality and fitting the standards. The sudden jump in work could be too much and this may cause a lot of issues and potentially a lot of angry adults and parents.
If one of the main reasons why Luxon has made this decision is because work hours and school hours end at different times, why not make school start later like at 11 so we would still have six hours of school. But still this may still cause problems because not all people have a 9 – 5 job.
A lot of people work shifts, or work at night, or early in the morning. So what if someone started work at 4:30PM? When will they have time to pick their children up from school? It would be un efficient because they might not have anyone else to pick their kids up.
My main point is why change it if the school times already work.
Please do NOT vote for the new HOURS and vote with our COMMUNITY In mind.
Sincerely George Bodger.