Photo by Marie-Elise Latorre

Several students during homeroom completely ignore the announcements about the Black Student Union showing the Black Panther movie. Homeroom is the only time when students are forced to listen to the announcements and even then, they ignore them.

I start my second period every day getting my art supplies from my drawer and sitting at my desk. It’s always a few minutes before the teacher yells “PLEDGE” and stands up abruptly facing the American flag, hand on her heart, getting the whole class to be quiet in these few minutes. The teacher never fails to announce the pledge, but what about the rest of the morning announcements? What about the announcements from clubs asking students to come to their interest meetings? Or the announcements that hold valuable information about specific activities?

Most of the time, students do not hear them, and with the homeroom and Wildcat Wellness schedules, announcements sometimes occur at seemingly random times. Sometimes the announcements take place at the beginning of lunch, which make them way too hard to listen to when the halls are filled with students talking louder than the intercom. Even though some students need the information, they are not able to hear it because lunch is very noisy and students are simply do not care how much noise they make. Sometimes they occur during the beginning of a period that is not second period. At the end of the day, the announcements over the intercom are usually useless. Some teachers force students to be quiet, but that does not guarantee that students are actually listening. However, what about other ways of showing the announcements?

Announcements shown on Promethean boards are more helpful than morning announcements on the intercom, but teachers would sometimes completely forget to show them and audio issues often occur. So what would be the best way to get the morning announcements out to the student body?
In our modern society that is oriented around technology, the best way would be through electronics. Whether it’s a text message or a simple Google Classroom that held all the valuable information, it would be a better alternative to an announcement over the intercom. Students would be able to opt-out if they were not interested in the announcements. And students who wanted to ask questions specifically about an announcement could easily do it. At the same time, second-period teachers would only have to waste one minute of their class on the pledge of allegiance. There would be no more mumbling over the intercoms or problems understanding the announcements due to technical difficulties. However, some might say that morning announcements are sent out to students through email, but the problem with that is that not that many people actually know about it. Nonetheless, a Google Classroom code could be easily spread around through English classes.