Laws and new bills get passed all the time and high school students rarely know about them. Even when these laws and bills affect students in their everyday life. Three bills are on their way to being passed either in Missouri or other states that might affect Missouri very soon.
The first bill is the Phillips-Hill’s bill. This will allow students to work from home on online assignments during snow days instead of extending the school year.
The would be called “flexible instructional days” and would work the same as a normal day of school. The only difference is that students would stay at home during days where the weather is too bad to travel.
With the addition of Chromebooks in schools adding days where students worked from home online would be an easy adjustment.
“Flexible instructional days are a valuable tool for schools because they offer an opportunity to meet the educational needs of students without having to extend the school year too deep into the summer,” Senate Education Committee Chairman Ryan Aument said.
The second bill is the Cronkite New Voices Act, more commonly referred to as the New Voices Act.
“In 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that censorship of certain articles in a student news publication didn’t violate the students’ First Amendment rights,” Editor and Chief of The Standard, Cortlynn Stark, wrote.
This bill would allow Missouri student journalists to have more freedom with what they write for school publications.
“Censoring student journalists actually hurts the future of journalism. When you take away their First Amendment rights to publish, you damage their trust in the system that supports journalism,” Stark wrote.
Many people seem to agree with Stark as this bill has been being pushed to pass since November, 2017. If the bill passes a whole new era of student journalism could take place.
The third bill would cause the school year start date to be in late August. Due to high rates of tourism in Missouri a change such as this would affect many groups of people.
“The proposal by Rep. Jeff Knight, R-Lebanon, would set the starting date no earlier than 14 days before the first Monday in September,” Kurt Erickson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote.
The sooner the school year begins, the sooner families have to end their summer vacations. This means Missouri is making less tourism money than what is wanted. Pushing the school year back even just two weeks would give students more of their break while also giving the state an income boost.