According to Simon, students with after-school jobs are learning time management skills and should not find it hard to keep up with their grades.

“You should be able to balance everything easily,” Simon said. “I have practice everyday after school, I’m in night school, I do work and I still manage to get eight hours of sleep everyday. If anything, my grades went up [when I started working] because I learned time management skills.”       

Students who work multiple jobs, like sophomore Alex Cappi, who is a volunteer firefighter and a cashier, find keeping a job and managing grades challenging.         

 “I have less time to focus on school,” Cappi said. “I keep [my grades] up but I do struggle in school.”  

Other students, like sophomore Katie Lawrence, who works at the Mexican restaurant Berry Hill, struggle less because they have lenient managers who let them work on homework while at work.

“I’m allowed to do my homework at work, but sometimes I can’t do big projects,” Lawrence said. “Then [working] does affect [my grades].”     

According to junior Vanessa Beltran, working at Jack in the Box was very difficult because she was over-worked.        

“I’d get into Jack in the Box at three o’clock, then they’d work me like a dog, and I wouldn’t get out until about one in the morning or midnight,” Beltran said. “I would have to rush through a lot of my homework, so sometimes it would be of a lesser quality. I don’t think it really affected my grades, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to be.”  

Although his after-school job took away time from doing school work, Simon argues that having a job taught him people skills.   

“I learned how to interact with people, regular people that are outside of school, so it wasn’t all bad,” Simon said.