It’s a Friday night, and you’re cramming in your homework because tomorrow morning you’ll have to head to work from 4 am to 9 pm, and when you come home you don’t have any time to finish your schoolwork because working takes too much time.

A typical job for a high schooler is fast food jobs and according to Zippia in 2020 there were 262,000 fast food and counter workers. Students should have 4 days of school a week and the school system should round the minutes of class to an hour each. Instead of 53 minutes per period for a regular day, there should be an hour, and for the block days, there should be 90 minutes instead of 85 minutes just to add more time to work in class. Having a Friday off will help advocate for students who have jobs on the weekend or just need more time to work on their schoolwork. For those who don’t need to finish their schoolwork, they can just enjoy a longer weekend break. In 2021 Zippia found that 30.5% of students had jobs at ages 16-19.

Some of these students’ mental health and sleep are impacted because of their homework, so to prevent this we should get a day off to complete the work. This is important because plenty of kids must balance their work time and schooling. With too much school it would be harder for them to complete their tasks in class so they would then cram it in on the weekend. Still, students only get from the end of the school day on Friday to Sunday which is impacted with work time so they only have to Friday and in the middle of the night both Saturday and Sunday. With the Friday off, students will have more time to socialize with friends, spend their time on hobbies, or relax from a week’s worth of work.

As a student, I would’ve liked to have a full Friday off because I had a weekend job and needed more time to work on my schoolwork. Students must be able to live their life with little to no stress, by being given a full day to work on their studies and incorporate time to socialize on the weekend.