By Samuel Strait, Reporter at Large – June 20, 2021 For many of us, the path to success was, notice the verb is "Was", a good education. While the current Del Norte High Principal, Alison Eckart, points to the past eighteen months of COVID-19 disaster as the reason for the high school's dismal performance, perhaps she must be unaware of the fact that the local public schools, which include the high school, were a disaster long before Covid-19 reared its debilitating head. One would think that someone who has spent twenty five years in a classroom, locally, would know this. Is it because the past eighteen months of educational fumbling has made the lack of educational success so obvious, that it can no longer be hidden from public view? Or is it that the whole educational system after years of lackluster performance has finally caught up with teachers that were educated in the very system that has them in today's classroom? Granted, one cannot paint broad strokes of blame over all who currently occupy the ranks of the educational community as they should not be held libel for decades of poor systemic teaching. Yet we continue to expect some sort of expertise from today's teachers that has not been forth coming. Teaching methods, tinkering with scheduling, more counseling, more contact with teachers, and on and on are "solutions" that seem to appear in a regular cycle. As with anything that has been tried multiple times and failed, why would our theoretical "brightest" educators be trying them again? Clearly Principal Eckart, who has been in the educational community and in a class room as well, would know and understand that tinkering with class daily scheduling will have zero chance of changing the downward spiral of public education. If she has at any time been in the classroom and noticed that most students have the attention span of a gnat. Encumbering them with ninety minute periods will only serve to waste seventy minutes of valuable teaching time. Ms. Eckart should be well acquainted with the phenomenon where young people can literally be counted on for showing some sort of deprivation should their cell phone be set down for more than ten seconds at a time. That is the only place where students might be expected to display an attention span of longer than twenty minutes in the classroom setting, providing it was some form of social media and is not educational. It hasn't been that long ago in this very school system that similar scheduling changes were proposed with not much change except a continued downward trajectory in over all performance at the high school. It was once pointed out to the School Board over thirty years ago when educational performance was a similar disaster, that eighth grade students a hundred years ago had to pass a test to graduate that most college educated students currently would be unable to pass. Clearly if changing the high school schedule from six periods to four ninety minute periods is the modern day answer to the problem, Principal Eckart seriously needs to reevaluate her role as principal at Del Norte High School for this has little to offer that has any chance of success. Repeating failure is not the answer to educational success.