In the Springfield Honors Academy, about half of the students are shown to only “sometimes” complete their homework.

Students don’t seem to always be turning in the homework assignments they were assigned, and this continues to be a recurring issue. There seems to be many reasons as to why students don’t always complete their work.

Some students from the academy were asked what they think about almost half the students not always turning in their homework. Anthony Santiago says “I feel like it is too low for SHA standards…”. While Santiago claims it is too low, Derrick James, another SHA student, says “I think that’s it’s reasonable because of the amount of homework the teachers give to the students”.

SHA has had a history with this recurring homework issue. Principal Howard-Donlin has also tried to talk to the students about this issue. She has talked to them about the consequences of not completing homework and how to avoid getting into that trouble.

According to a survey that was taken by 137 SHA students, 49 percent of the students sometimes complete their homework, 43 percent always complete it, seven percent rarely complete homework, and zero percent never complete homework.

Out of the 179 eligible students who could have taken the survey, 137 participated in taking the survey. The survey came out with a margin of error of 4.1 percent, and a confidence level of 95 percent. A margin of error is how off the data can be and the confidence level is how confident one is about the data being accurate.

With homework rates being at this low rate, SHA staff has developed methods in order to do their homework. Recently, staff has stated if students complete all their homework until Thanksgiving break, they won’t receive any during that break. A few students have seen the paper for this in the hallway, and some of them have mixed opinions on it.

Derrick James says “I think it’s good that they’re giving us a chance to actually enjoy the break, without any worries of homework”. Anthony Santiago says “It seems like a decent idea, but I don’t know how it’ll help the students. All it is, is giving the students a load of homework, just to have them not have any homework during the break when they shouldn’t have any in the first place”. James represents the opinion of the majority of the student body, while Santiago represents a small fraction of the student body.

The issue of homework during Thanksgiving break is one of the methods SHA uses to handle the homework issue. Another way they attempted to increase homework completion rates is by giving punishments that include the following: teacher detention, office detention, Saturday school, etc.

These punishments made a temporary change in the rates. Once staff noticed the homework rates declining once more, they put the incentive idea into action. So far, staff hasn’t officially announced the incentive, but it can be seen in the hall, next to the main office.

Possibly next week, Principal Howard-Donlin will announce this incentive to the whole student body. Students will likely take the incentive into consideration and manage to increase their homework rates to the teachers’ expectations.