It’s only 1:00 pm and school is already over. You can still go to out for lunch with your friends, and you don’t even have to go back to school after lunch.

In fact, it’s Friday, so you can spend the entire afternoon enjoying yourself and not even start worrying about homework. Best of all, unlike last year’s late start days that shortened the school day by only one hour for students, this year’s new early release days now let students out of school two hours early.

One of the major reasons why the School District of Clayton has switched all of its schools from late-start Wednesdays to early-release Fridays was to help parents who had trouble driving their children to school an hour late due to their work schedule. Teachers also benefit by not having to get the the faculty meeting an hour earlier than the normal school day.

Now that the district has had its first two early-release days, the effect that this schedule change, on students especially, is very significant.

Previously, with late-start days, all that students could do was either wake up on Wednesday with an extra hour before school, or sleep in. Although both options sound appealing, in practice neither is very beneficial for everyone.

Sleeping in disrupts a student’s normal sleeping patterns, as well as cause the students to stay up later the previous night knowing that they can go to school later.

Many CHS students also need their parents to take them to school, so some students still have to go to school at the normal time on late-start mornings in order to fit with their parent’s work schedule.

Early-release, on the other hand, has much more benefits. Many students at CHS are normally too busy after school to have much time to hang out with friends, and especially too busy to go out for a meal.

Early-release days give students the perfect opportunity to do all of those social activities, no matter how busy a student is.

Unfortunately, the only current issue with early release is sports. All of the teachers who normally coach any sport cannot be at practice because of the faculty meeting, and even coaches from other schools are not released from their school until the normal practice time.

But as long as students who are participating in sports organize themselves to practice, the change from late-starts to early-releases has no negative impacts.