Recently, the school administration has made the decision to make Patriot Period much more restrictive. Patriot Period is a free period that occurs twice a week on block days. It was designed to give students an opportunity to get work done during the school day. In years past, students have had the freedom to go wherever they want during this period. The change makes it so that students will now have to stay in their third period teacher’s class.

The new change replicates the style of Washington-Lee and Wakefield High School’s free periods where students stay in their third period classes for the duration of the time. The only exception to this is when students acquire a pass from one of their other teachers. In this case, students can leave and do work in another classroom.

There are plenty of reasons for the change, but Principal Bridget Loft has made it clear that school safety was a top priority.

“Given the school shootings that happened last year and an increasing sense of the need for school safety and to sort of tighten our protocols, I find it untenable to have my students spread throughout the building … when something could happen during Patriot Period. We essentially had created a time that was [a] pretty target-rich environment,” Loft said.

It is widely known that school shootings have become much more frequent in recent years. In fact, there has been more deaths by shooting in the last 18 years than the 20th century as a whole. No one can dispute that shootings are a serious threat to school communities.

Because of this overarching problem, the change was almost certainly necessary. Interestingly though, Loft used the change to do more than just make the school safer.

“Patriot Period was created with three ideas in mind. One was to give you additional time to get caught up on stuff. The second was to get additional time built in the schedule for kids who need help and the third is decompression. That second piece wouldn’t happen for everybody because, let’s be honest, if you need to go to Patriot Period sometimes you really don’t want to go. You’d rather be decompressing, so to have more structure built into Patriot Period allows the connection between the teacher and the kid in a much more efficient way than what we had last year,” Loft said.

Loft believes that the change has greatly increased the productivity of students during the time. In years past, students would use Patriot Period to socialize and relax. In fact, it was difficult to find a free seat in the cafeteria, the most popular spot for students to congregate. The new change will definitely begin to marginalize that aspect of the period. Peter Jacobsen, a student at Wakefield High School, has a much different view of his free period.

“Warriors’ Period isn’t really a time meant for us to do whatever we want. It’s there so we have time to catch up on work or to get ahead. If we want to go to a different teacher, then we just get a pass to go there, which is … honestly not hard to do at all,” Jacobsen said.

Despite Jacobsen’s beliefs, students have found it difficult adjusting to the new system.

“I used to use Patriot Period as a way to meet with teachers before a test or spontaneous stuff like that, but now since you need a pass, if you realize you need it too late, it’s really hard to meet with teachers,” junior Lui Shipper said.

As is evident by the changes made last year around the school, Loft does not shy away from problems.

“I also hear though from kids that our current system has some flaws and I think we need to continue to work together to tweak it to the best of our ability,” Loft said.

With the ever-changing school community, it is likely that we will continue to see changes to the system in order to address different problems. One thing is certain though, Patriot Period will continue to provide whatever kind of academic help students need.