It appears that I may have misread your position. I thought that you were opposed to an hour-long SE in principle (“It should NOT take an hour to daven Shmoneh Esrei every day”, period); but now you seem to be saying the problem is only that such a long SE will interfere with classes. That is a different argument than the one I thought was taking place.
I’m not opposed to it in principle. However, it must be acknowledged that it *is* unusual to take an hour to daven Shmoneh Esrei and, like anything else that is unusual, if it intereferes with normal routine activities (such as going to school), then it *does* become a problem.
However, I still disagree with you. The mornings in our school system are spent in Avodas Hakodesh, and there is little Avodas Hakodesh a person (particularly a girl who is not mechuyav in talmud Torah) can be doing that is as productive as davening.
I disagree. A school has a program and a cirriculum. A school cannot make customized schedules for every girl based on their own peculiarities. They have to schedule classes at a time that’s convenient for them and they have to have all the girls conform to that schedule. You cannot run a school if one girl feels that her davening will allow her to skip the first period or two and another girl feels that her chesed mission is more important than class and a third girl feels that she’d be more spiritually accomplished by learning sefer X when the class is learning sefer Y. That’s not a school — that’s anarchy.
The Wolf