Every year, Naperville Central seniors engage in several “ditch days,” where a large chunk of the class takes the day off from school to work on college applications, hang out with friends or to recuperate from prom at the end of second semester. 

While ditch days are routine, they aren’t school-sanctioned. Usually, they’re planned by the senior class leadership or spread over social media. Skip days are usually Mondays, and they are, as many teachers are apt to point out, not truly “ditching”: instead, they involve students being called out of school. 

So it makes sense that teachers are unhappy; students not only miss out on instruction, but the school must deal with hundreds of attendance calls from parents. 

As a senior myself, I got to experience my first ditch day a couple weeks back on Halloween. The Central Barstool Instagram account polled all seniors asking which of three available dates worked best, and Tuesday, Nov. 1 won out. 

I see several problems with this ditch day and ditching as a whole. 

First, the timing. 

Like I mentioned earlier, ditch days normally fall on Monday in order to extend the weekend. Since this ditch day was scheduled for Tuesday, it created a ton of confusion for seniors. Many people ended up taking both Monday and Tuesday off. 

Nov. 1 is also the early action/decision deadline for many U.S. colleges.

From a distance, having a ditch day fall exactly on top of a college deadline seems perfect, but it is far from it. I, like many other stressed seniors, finished early applications at least a few days before the deadline for fear of system lag with the submission portals. Therefore, the Halloween skip day had little to no academic use. I spent the day hanging out with friends, thinking about what could’ve been a productive time had it come a little earlier. 

To make things worse, many seniors do need a day or several days out of school to finish college applications, meaning that many students this year took the ditch day and the previous week off. 

Second, the concept. 

Ditch days aren’t all the hype. Teachers still give homework, sometimes a little extra to punish ditchers. Some of my teachers even handed out extra credit for participation or attendance, giving a free grade boost to underclassmen. In addition, after-school activities still happen. I had to come to school at the end of the day, and several others didn’t ditch just to attend these meetings.

Planning effective ditch days involves taking college deadlines into consideration and making sure they fall on a Monday to avoid confusion. But all in all, they’re still great.