With the start of the 2019-2020 school year came many new changes for North Forsyth, one of which has been quite controversial. Raider Time is an attempt to provide built-in time throughout the day to complete homework and improve mental health. Each day, students spend 37 minutes in a class that they choose at the beginning of the week. On Wednesdays, students must attend two sessions as well as a “Wellness Wednesday” session, which entails coloring, naptime, and other activities of the sort. Though it may seem great in concept, many students find that this new system is actually proving to be more stressful and wastes too much valuable time. 

FlexTime Manager, the website that students must use to select which sessions they will attend, is most often extremely slow and hard to use. Ideally, students should sign up for sessions over the weekend, but how are kids supposed to know if they need to attend a math help session on Friday if it’s only Sunday? Administration has recently implemented a time constraint that limits the window of selection to 12 p.m. on Mondays, meaning that students are unable to revise their selections if they decide they need to attend a different help session throughout the week. Most of the time, the scheduling website is slow and difficult to work, so it takes far too long to sign up for classes and students end up running out of time. This leaves hundreds of students stuck in sessions that they don’t need, and therefore wasting 37 minutes of their day, every single day. 

Administration has also made the announcement that no student is permitted to go to the bathroom during Raider Time, as the class is ‘too valuable’ for kids to be spending a few minutes in the restroom. For many, Raider Time is actually the best time of the day to take a restroom break because they won’t be missing any real instruction, only a silent study hall. This hostage lockdown situation is unsettling and definitely doesn’t make it seem like the students’ best interests are being valued. Why restrict kids to going to the restroom during actual, valuable classes rather than taking the time during a meaningless ‘class’ that they’re just sitting in anyway? Not to mention, many students have been forced to log onto FlexTime Manager during core class to make sure they are signed up for the week, completely wasting valuable class time.

It is clear that NFHS administration has good intentions for implementing Wellness Wednesday, but many students just don’t see the value. Students are forced to put away their school work for an hour each Wednesday to color, nap, and just listen to music. However, with Wednesday and Thursday being popular test days, most kids just want to study or get homework out of the way during this time. Being forced to ‘relax’ for a little bit seems to actually just be adding on the pressure. 

Anes Ribic, senior, feels that there is no need to have Raider Time every day. “I don’t like that we have to go five days a week,” he expressed.  “If we went one time such as IF it would go a lot smoother.” In previous years, IF (or instructional focus) occurred once per week and was much like Raider Time in the fact that students could go to teachers for help or to make up tests. 

Raider Time and Wellness Wednesday seem like programs that could potentially be  beneficial for the student body, but for now, the execution is lacking and it’s simply proving to be a big waste of time.