Maggie Walker has always been known for its immense prestige and academic excellence, filled with students who are both well-rounded and toppers in class. However, along with these outstanding qualities comes an ugly truth: they will go to any length to meet high expectations. Perfection often takes its toll on the erudite students at the governor’s school, and this leads to multiple concerns that may be addressed but are often difficult to handle. Faculty and staff have led efforts to help students deal with the workload and pressure being a high schooler brings, but pupils are questioning their effectiveness. To limit the students' daily stresses, rules like the homework policy are in place, and MLWGS faculty organizes events like mindfulness week. Despite these noble efforts, though, sleep deprivation and declining mental health continue to plague our school’s population.

Maggie Walker is infamous for its homework load. The intense rigor of the governor’s school and the curriculum that it provides need reinforcement so that the information sticks, but it is understood that managing time can become tedious. The homework policy was created to limit the amount of work students get per class each night to ensure their downtime, and it is stated that honors classes have a limit of 30 minutes of homework per night, while advanced placement classes have an hour. 

In a survey sent out to the student body, about 30% of students say that they have one to two hours of homework per night, 58% say they have two to four hours, and 13% said they get four or more hours of work. These numbers fluctuate depending on the week; as one student put it, “As little as zero hours of homework but as much as 10 hours a night.” While some teachers strictly follow this policy, others struggle to do so, considering the vast amount of content their classes contain and the deadlines educators have to meet. Furthermore, about 96% say that some or none of their classes enforce this policy, while only four percent say that all of their classes have followed the rule. 

“That little push outside of the homework policy range is just enough to make your night a lot more stressful, without quite getting you enough to go to administration about it,” elaborates Alexia Creeden, a junior at MLWGS. She explains how even though some teachers will address the policy at the beginning of the year, it is never strictly enforced, which becomes difficult for students to present a proper case to administrators. “It’s Maggie Walker; even if you get ahead [of the work], it’s frustrating, like you just ran a marathon and there’s another one to run after that,” laments Sree Gangireddy, a freshman on the Robotics and TSA team at MLWGS. While homework is an essential part of education, its purpose is defeated when it takes away from a student’s ability to focus and function properly within the classroom and outside as well.

Amid a stressful week in the third quarter, the Honor Council at Maggie Walker graced the student body with a kind gesture: mindfulness week. Honor Council members organized fun-filled and palliative activities like yoga and delicious goods such as cookies, tea, and candy grams to send during lunch for the students to enjoy. In addition to these lunchtime luxuries, teachers were requested to not assign any homework over the weekend. While some students certainly benefited from a free weekend, others stated that the rule did not benefit them for multiple reasons. A freshman expressed his remorse, saying, “I still had the same amount of homework, the only difference is that I didn’t have any due over the weekend, and that wasn’t helpful whatsoever because I could just do it on Saturday.” Many agree with this sentiment. “I know that a lot of juniors and sophomores had college kickoff,” Creeden states. She went on to say that it was even more stressful trying to attend the event while also catching up on work, explaining, “I missed class and had even more stuff to make up out of having the college kick-off.”

Although the constant stress during this time of the year–one student calls it “Death March,” to symbolize the immense pressure that students go through during this period of the school year–defeats the purpose of mindfulness week, students still appreciated the light that it placed on the student body’s mental health at the governor’s school. “I’m not sure if [mindfulness week] was really helpful, but I think the idea behind it was a direction I’d love to see our school going in,” Creeden says. 

Strenuous activities including lectures, classwork, exams, homework, and other extracurriculars that Maggie Walker students commit to leave students feeling stressed and burned out by the end of the day. Not only does this affect their performance in school, but also outside of it. According to a survey conducted by The Jabberwock, About 56% of students say they have six to seven hours of sleep per school night, while only 17% say they have more than seven hours of sleep, which is concerning since the average teenager needs nine to ten hours of sleep a night. In the survey, when asked how much their sleep schedule affects their performance in class, the majority of students responded that they find it difficult to concentrate on their daily activities. “I think for me, just coming in really drowsy in the morning– it’s really hard to focus,” Gangireddy clarifies. “The first few minutes, I’m just trying to get acclimated because it's really hard to focus right after not getting a great night's sleep.” 

This inability to focus hinders a student’s capacity to perform their best at school and at home. When analyzing the responses, a trend of procrastination was visible throughout; some students disclosed that once they get back home from school, it’s excruciating to focus on their remaining homework when all they want to do is go back to bed and sleep. Students not only say that it’s affecting their performance in school and extracurriculars outside of school, but that they also have seen a significant decrease in motivation to be active and hang out with friends and family. 

“After I finish my homework, by then I’m kind of burnt out. I’m tired,” Creeden specifies when asked about how much she uses her free time to be active physically and socially. “My free time almost consists of sleeping because all the energy I have is to sleep or watch TV.” Creeden further expresses her concerns about how unnoticed this behavior in students is, stating, “It’s really sad because our society is telling us ‘Oh teenagers should go out and have fun, do activities, sports, you name it’ but by the time I finish my five hours of homework, I don’t feel like going out or hanging out with anyone.” The issue of student burnout and stress is so severe that it has become a running joke among peers to say they have not slept and have been working impossible hours. Creeden asserts that “It’s been a long-standing joke at Maggie Walker, being like ‘Oh look at me, I have so much work and so little sleep; that’s hilarious!’ In reality, it’s a serious issue at our school that needs to be spoken about seriously.” 

While Maggie Walker’s burnout culture affects the student’s performance both in school and outside, it is important to note that the MLWGS faculty are doing their best to make a better community. Due to the governor’s school’s rigor, it is difficult to manage a complex curriculum and keep the work minimal so that it does not overstep the student’s life outside of school. “If there are any changes that we can make at Maggie Walker, I think we do need to tighten up some of the loopholes in our homework policy, and I think there is a lot of fine-tuning that has to be made for us to have a significant impact on the student body,” Creeden concludes. MLWGS is a bright school full of marvelous students and exceptional staff, yet the rigorous nature of the school naturally causes issues with workload and stress. But with honor on both sides of ensuring greater mental health resource access and ways for students to receive the help they need, we can ensure this environment of growth and trust we have created in this school remains long-lasting.