Daylight savings time causes many to feel out of the loop.
A AP-NORC poll from late 2019 found that 28 percent of people surveyed about their opinions on daylight savings wanted to keep switching back and forth between daylight savings all year round. 31 percent of people wanted to move daylight savings time all year around and topping that all, 40 percent of the surveyed would rather eliminate daylight savings time as a whole.
Last sunday, the clocks were turned one hour back at 2 a.m. and like the results of the poll, students had differing opinions of the event.
Some find daylight savings as an opportunity to literally save your day time. Adding an hour to the day makes some people more productive and able to work easier.
“I am a big fan of daylight savings,” senior Naomi Lee said. “Having sunlight for a majority of the day allows for more energy conservation due to the lights that aren’t needed to be turned on. It also makes the day feel so much longer, even when the hours are the same.”
Not everyone agrees. Some believe it ends up making their life harder and their schedules unnecessarily complicated.
“Daylight savings is a waste of time for me personally, the only thing I get out of it is an hour less of sleep and a more complicated route home,” junior Leslie Portillo said. “Most of the time I don’t even realize that it’s daylight savings until the sun is down at 5 p.m.”
Some counselors and teachers prefer to leave work during lighter hours, but when daylight savings springs forward, the staff have no choice but to work till sun-down.
“It takes my body a while to get adjusted with the upcoming daylight savings,” Attendance Counselor Ms. Shirley Shamsi said. “I like daylight savings where it’s still lighter outside when it’s late at night,”“I feel like people are able to do more at home or after school or after work.”
“I prefer working when it’s dark out because I feel like everything is much more quiet than when the sun is out,” Portillo said. “I feel better being inside when it’s dark, instead of feeling like I’m missing out when i’m working during the day time.” Lee has similar views as Portillo, “ Even though I prefer when it stays lighter out for a longer time, I like when it gets darker soon solely because I am more productive during dark hours in the night time,” Lee said.
Even Senior Office Technician Ms. Maribel Ramos is not a big fan of daylight savings unless we fall backwards. “The only daylight savings I like is when we fall back because we get an extra hour of sleep,” Ms. Maribel said. “I do not like the spring daylight savings because we lose an hour of sleep. It takes me an hour to get to work so I could use that hour to be in bed.”
In the decades since the introduction, daylight savings time continues to polarize the people that follow the shifts. Whether it will ever change remains to be seen, but for now, everyone including the students and staff at school are left to deal with it in their own ways.
