It’s 3:15 p.m. and you just pulled in the driveway to your house. You grab a drink out of the fridge and pull out homework material for three classes and a half-completed writing assignment due at the end of the week. You manage to slay a little more than three fourths of assignments and realize that an hour has gone by. Uh-oh. It’s 4:15. You have to be at work by 5. This story is all too common for many upperclassmen in high school, and usually the experience lasts throughout their scholastic careers. This is a classic conflict: employment during the school year interfering with either time needed to tackle a high volume of homework at night or getting much-needed sleep for positive classroom performance — or in many cases –both. “I usually leave the house at 4:30 p.m. to get to work 10 minutes early to prepare to clock in at my five o’ clock shift at Domino’s Pizza,” said Chris Helenkompf, a 17-year-old student at Male High School. “I’m usually there until (the) after-dinner rush ends at around 9:30 – 10:00 p.m. A lot of times later than that.” Asked if completes his homework and/or studying after a work night, Helenkompf replied with a small grin and said, “Well, I try to. It’s definitely hard to really strive to knock it all out after being up and on my feet from early morning to late night. I usually want to chill after work and rush to get homework that’s left over done in the morning before I get to the class that it’s due.” Of mixing outside work and homework, Seth Wyatt, 17 and a senior at Trinity, said, “It’s a real time crunch. At least three times a week, I go to work right after school, and I don’t get off until 10 o’clock. By then, I’m ready to go to sleep, and it makes it a lot harder to stay on top of homework and assignments. Sometimes I get home and fall asleep by accident. If not, falling asleep while doing homework has become normal. Very few, if any, allowances are made for those who have work and cannot make assignment due dates.” The Youth Employment provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act for the Nonagricultural Occupations (FLSA), enacted by the U.S. Department of labor under the Employment Standards Administration in the wage and hour division, states in regards to the minimum-age standards for employment section that the age of 16 is the “minimum age for employment. Sixteen- and 17-year-olds may be employed for a limited number of hours in any occupation — other than those declared hazardous by the secretary of labor.” With that being said, balancing a job and homework is usually up to communication between the student, the employer, and in many cases, the parents. “I had to call up Domino’s and speak with Chris’s manager because him coming home at 11:30 -12:00ish at night was absolutely insane on a weekday when he has school. I mean, it was pretty obvious that it was hurting his grades,” Helenkompf’s mother, Daysha, said. “I wondered for the longest time how he was getting his homework done with the type of schedule he had — and it turns out he wasn’t.” Nearing adulthood, students in high school – and in college — will find that figuring out how to balance school and a job is one of many challenges they will encounter.