This year Blue Valley High School got a new edition to their scheduling. Students now have an hour long lunch break to eat lunch, talk to a teacher, make up anything, or to just relax. There are two parts to the hour long lunch break, A and B lunch. A and B lunch is divided up to give teachers their time to eat lunch and help students as well. Some students seem to be improving their grades with the Tiger Paws scheduling as well.

Tiger Paws came about when Principal Bacon noticed how it improved a school in Florida. “Tiger Paws came from a couple of schools. Mr. Bacon read an article about a school in Florida that piloted the idea and had a lot of good data to back up the idea. He went down and visited that high school to get a feel for how they implemented the idea. Additionally, one of the Blue Springs High Schools also had a similar time, so a group of students and teachers from BV went over to visit and observe” said math teacher Mr. Jonathan Jost.

There were also some goals that came along with this addition to the students schedules. “The goal was to give the students some time to take care of anything they needed to, and to also give students a break in the middle of the day. The desire was to give students some autonomy about how they use their time” said Mr. Jost.

Mr. Jost and Personal Finance and Accounting teacher, Mr.  Layne Funk have helped many students and have seen what they can do with their grade when they actually have more time to prepare and ask questions.

“In my opinion, students who are really hard workers but have not always been comfortable with content are the students who have benefitted the most. Those are the students whose grades are seeing the most improvement” said Mr. Jost.

With the improving grades, Tiger Paws is most likely to stay around for awhile. In other cases, some teachers believe that students aren’t using their time wisely and are goofing around when they could be improving grades instead of social statuses. Mr. Funk said, “Some students choose not to complete assignments… even when school schedules time for them. Getting behind in college is not fun… extremely hard to recover/catch up. Why any student would get behind in school is beyond me!”

Mr. Jost and Mr. Funk have both realized that staying in their classrooms for both A and B lunch has helped students out more with what they need and is very beneficial to other students that are just looking for a place to eat lunch. “I’ve learned to stay and eat in my classroom. I’m available for both A & B time, I get my homework done too. I can always takes advantage of more time. Sometimes students come in to review material, ask questions,or just to work on a computer in a quiet climate.” said Mr. Funk.

Now that Tiger Paws has

officially started up and students are actually using it for certain things school wise, Mr. Bacon has been making annual reports on how good or bad Tiger Paws is for the students and if it is actually something worth keeping around.

“The preliminary data Mr. Bacon reported last week is promising, at least for two of the four classes… we’ll see how it pans out over the course of the year” said Mr. Funk.