Schedule Woes Affect the Start of School

The first week of school is always chaos, but the counselling center was especially chaotic this year. The lines at the counseling center seemed to stretch a lot longer than previous years. Students could stand in line for hours at a time those first few days, and some wouldn’t even get in to talk to their counselor.
The crowd of students became so bad that Heather Parry, a secretary in the counselling center, took on a role similar to a bouncer for the students.
She stood in front of the center, talking to students about their requests, leading students back to the counselor’s offices, and taking class request papers from students. Parry helped the counselors in a major way by making the line of students move quicker and organizing the chaos.
There were a lot of schedule issues this year that needed to be fixed. Some students needed a hole filled or to reschedule a double-booked class. Others wanted to switch into a different math class or swap one elective course for another. At times, it seemed like almost everyone in the school wanted something changed.
Many of the issues that occurred this year were the result of students choosing the wrong classes last spring. A lot of students changed their mind after putting their classes into PowerSchool which meant that the computer’s master schedule didn’t accurately represent what students wanted.
“Instead of circling classes on a piece of paper where they took that paper home and had their parents look over it with them, students just did it online and I think they weren’t always thoughtful about what they chose,” Highland counselor Lisa Madsen said. “We had a bunch of kids change their mind about their math class over the summer and then they dropped a math class that they had chosen and tried to go into one that then filled.”
An example of that was AP Statistics. Not everyone who wanted to take the class selected it in the spring, so the computer scheduled only two AP Stats sections. Normally, there are three. So this year, the classes ending up being really large with about 40 kids in each section.
“I only have seats for 32 kids, but we just added more chairs and made it 40. And I have a very small classroom, so it makes it very challenging,” Highland AP Statistics teacher Stephanie Watrin said. “I felt like more kids would’ve switched in, but they actually turned back [students] because the limit is 40. I don’t know how many were turned back which makes me really sad because if people want to challenge themselves and they can’t get in the class, I don’t think that’s right.”
Additionally, there were lots of students who wanted to switch into different elective classes. The art classes, especially ceramics, and the culinary classes were quite popular this year, per usual. But if the student didn’t select that class initially, it was almost impossible for them to get in come the beginning of school because there weren’t enough sections made to fit the demand.
Another reason scheduling was more chaotic than usual this year was the high number of unexpected students. Highland gained about 200 extra students just before school started, bumping the student population up to about 2,000 students. These were kids who live in the Highland boundaries but were not registered until just before school started because of a recent move or getting denied at another high school.
Creating these students’ schedules was a lot more difficult than fixing holes or changing classes because they took so much more time. Building all these schedules from scratch became one of the biggest challenges the counselors faced this year.
Along with having more students this year than last, Highland lost some teachers as well. When a few teachers retired last year, Highland didn’t replace them because of a loss of Covid relief funding. This means that highland has less teachers, so classroom numbers are higher.
“We have really tried to set a hard limit at no classes being over 40 [this year],” Highland Principal, Jeremy Chatterton, said. “We had a really glorious past three years of making sure that we had small class sizes, we were really trying to cap everything at 35 and most of our classes were in the low 30s.”
So, because of class selection issues, a lower number of teachers, and unexpected students, Highland ended up with more scheduling issues than normal. On top of that, one counselor left on maternity leave shortly before school started and another was in the process of getting trained.
So, both Principal Chatterton and Highland Spanish teacher Emily Towler had to step in to help the counselors get through all the students.
“I’m subbing in for Nicole Bogue while she’s on maternity leave,” Towler said. “I’m a student at the U for my master’s in counselling, so this is part of my internship. So, I’m an intern slash sub for Nicole.”
With their help, the counselors were able to get through all the students and cut off schedule changes two days into the second week of school. The counselors are already talking about ways that they can help the process go smoother next year.
One possibility is going back to paper schedules to help students choose their classes with more consideration. Either way, Madsen knows there was a lot of time wasted at the beginning of the year and is intent on changing that next year.
“The thing that’s not acceptable is to have kids spend that first week of school waiting in line,” Madsen said. “So, we have had lots of conversations, and we are going to do better next year. One idea that we’re kicking around is having one day, the Friday maybe, before school starts that is just schedule changes so that everything is resolved before the first day of school.”