Shields Up is a new program that has been put into our school’s daily schedule in order to help both freshmen and other students academically. This is the first year that Arroyo High School has implemented this program.

“It’s an intervention that the staff came up with to help support our students academically,” said Mrs. Angelita Gonzales, Principal.

For the last year and a half a group of teachers have been working together to find a solution to helping students with their school work. The staff found the program and were very enthusiastic about the idea, making the decision to start the Shields Up program as of this year.

“They did their research and talked to other staff members here and they were able to just get it going and they decided to try and start it this year,” said Mrs. Gonzales.

The Shields Up program takes place between 4th period and lunch. Students who meet certain requirements, such as a certain GPA, are able to attend long lunch, an added 24 minutes to the regular lunch period. Other students who do not meet these requirements must attend study hall, where they use these 24 minutes to work on their homework or get help wherever needed. This will change once the 6 week grading period is finished. The freshmen however, do not apply to this. They have their own separate program called “Freshman Focus.”

“Freshman are doing a whole different component from what the 12th graders are doing… I think orientating them into high school is very important,” Mrs. Gonzales stated.

The ultimate goal of this new program is to provide an incentive for all of the students attending here who have a D or an F to work harder and obtain a better grade for the award of a longer lunch period. Our school provides students with programs after school such as tutoring to accomplish the same thing, help students with their work. However, after not seeing much progress made the school made the final decision to put Shields Up into effect.

“The bottom line is to help our students with a D and F rate… We want to try and motivate them to improve their grades and give them support. We offer them various programs after school and I don’t think that they’re using it as much as they should, so we wanted to do something during the school day so that they can get the support that they needed.”