By Finn Thomas

Messenger Staff Writer

Many students may go to teachers to get help with their school work, but sometimes teachers have multiple students that need assistance, or they may not available. A new option could be put in place someday, at Placer, that would allow an extra period of time for students to get help, if they needed,

Recently, a group of staff members from placer, including Principal Peter Efstathiu visited some schools down in Merced City School District and got some ideas.

“I think what this stems from is myself, two other teachers, and a counselor visited some schools down in the Merced school district who have, for lack of a better term, intervention type schedule anywhere from three to four days a week built to service students who are not meeting GPA standards,” Efstathiu began.

The Merced school districts had three “categories” of students, separated by what their GPA was.  The students with high GPA had an option of what they would like to do during the intervention period.

“They broke it into three categories, kids below like a 1.0 who need severe intervention, kids below a 2.0 and 3.0 who could use some tutoring help because we want you above a 3.0, and then students above a 3.0, and those students were the ones that would either have a longer lunch, while the other students were in their tutoring, or very individually directed type intervention instruction, or they were asked to also help in those scenarios,” Efstathiu said.

Students that would decide to help with the other students who needed it would have a benefit, rather than the students who choose to have a longer lunch if they didn’t need intervention, who wouldn’t get a benefit.

“So lets say you were a kid with above a 3.8 GPA and you’ve got aspirations after high school, and one thing that looks good on your transcript is helping other students, you may volunteer to do some tutoring of those students who aren’t doing so well and could use some help and benefit from your expertise. Other students choose to have longer lunch, ” Efstathiu continued.

Having this system would help students get their questions answered more efficiently, since teachers don’t have a whole lot of extra time to answer separate questions before, during, and after class.

“Trying to find you teacher in the morning, there could be ten kids there and they all have ten different questions and the teacher is just overwhelmed because if you get there at 7:30 you’re not going to get there in time. When you come during lunch, a lot of teachers give up their lunch, but they need a break too, so this would just create more time within the day, and it would allow kids to go specifically to a group where you all have the same question,” stated Efstathiu.

Considering some students would have an extended lunch option, it would be very possible for many students that were scheduled to go to the intervention extra period would skip class.  This could be a concern with Placer’s off campus lunch, and some students might just leave.

“It really depends on the person, if they just don’t care then they don’t care about their school or anything they would probably just cut class, but if the actually care about school and having a great life, then they would push themselves to get the better GPA, and get the extended lunch,” Placer student Carley Mickel stated, concluding that some people would most likely cut class from the possible intervention class, but others would actually get the help they needed.

Another Placer student, Samantha Voss, had a different side to whether or not students would work hard and get the help they needed during the intervention extra period.

“I feel like even if you did put more school into the school periods then it wouldn’t make them work harder, it would just make them have more time to do less work,” she stated.

Although the Merced City School District is currently using this system to have students who need help get it, Placer high school isn’t thinking about it anytime soon.

“This is not even talked about with the staff, the idea has been bantered about, but in no way are we looking at this in the near future, this might be something down the road. There is so many things going on, the last thing we want to do is have one more pile of things that we’re doing,” Efstathiu concluded.