Throughout the past week, students and teachers have noticed a change in the volume of the bells. The administration has been working to address these fluctuations with the outside company in order to address these concerns.

“For the past week or so, the bells have been pretty inconsistent volume-wise. When the period ends and no bell rings, my teachers have been dismissing us either a couple minutes early or late. While it isn’t too much of an inconvenience, the inconsistency has us all for a bit of a loop,” said Milla Zuniga (‘23).

The fluctuations started when teachers started to notice how loud the bells were, causing many of them to put up pieces of paper to try to block the sound. When the administrators contacted the company to try and make the bells quieter, many thought that this change was too drastic, and the bells were now too quiet.

“I noticed when the volume went down because I couldn’t hear the bell ring when I was in the J building staff lounge, and several teachers that were there commented that they couldn’t hear the bell ring. I would say that though the loud bells can be annoying it is important that everyone in and outside of the classroom can hear them,” said Vice Principal Brendan Nelson.

However, with drills, rallies, and even AP testing at the end of the year, this is not the first time that changes have had to be made. The office staff works with the same company every time there is going to be a change to the bells for the day.

“We all work together in the office, administrators and our amazing office staff work together to make sure that they know there is a change to the bell schedule, so they can do that on their end. It is a team effort,” said Nelson.

Bells are designed to give structure to the day, make sure everyone is on the same schedule, and maximize the amount of time teachers and students spend in the classroom. 

“As much as I would like to believe that we could do this without bells, I really think that we need to keep  the bells in place. Not everyone on campus is time sensitive and people might lose track of time, so certain classes might go longer or go shorter and particularly at the end of lunch students are not necessarily going to know that it is the end of lunch,” said Nelson.