The most common issue at the beginning of every school year seems to be scheduling issues. The first two weeks continue to consist of students transferring in and out of classes, lines stretching out of the counseling office, kids scrambling to email teachers or counselors, all of the usual works. With the beginning of Granada’s first year using the semester system officially in motion, we have witnessed firsthand that nothing has changed.
The issue seems to have grown more intense in both scale and proportion. From students disappearing off class rosters to entire schedules being wrong, many kids reported issues of much larger magnitude than in previous years. Students spoke of stressful and confusing situations with their schedules. Teachers reported stress and a need to be more adaptable. To understand the cause of these issues, I talked to Mrs. Ha and Mrs. Therrien who provided invaluable insight into the scheduling process and who is in charge of the operation. They gave one extremely important piece of information: No one is at fault.
The admins have done their best to get people the classes they need, counselors have been breaking their backs to get kids into the classes they want, and teachers have been doing their best to roll with the punches and adapt accordingly. It’s clear just how hard the staff and admins of Granada work to make our high school experience as enjoyable as possible.
The most notable thing that occurred in the first few days of school was the massive amount of students who reported an issue with their schedule. Of course, this is present at the beginning of every school year, but the frequency at which these complaints were coming in was drastically different this year. “In 23-24 which would be last year, we had 724 [request forms submitted to change a student’s schedule]. And this year, we had 1,702,” said Mrs. Ha.
The issue was especially noticeable in class where students began to frequently switch in, drop out, or in rare cases get involuntarily removed from the class. “I was in AP Macroeconomics and I found out that I no longer had it in my Schoology. It just completely disappeared from my profile and I was not even on the class roster,” commented Sofia Bourque, a Senior.
The problem was swiftly resolved, but I spoke to Mrs. Therrien to get some insight into why it may have happened and to answer the question everyone has been asking: Why has there been such a dramatic increase in scheduling issues? Mrs. Therrien says, “With the switch to semesters, students have much less freedom to move their classes around. Whereas before, if a student couldn’t get a class we didn’t have to worry about it. Say a student wanted to take Art in [trimester] one but it conflicted with their English. Well, we could just move their English to [the] second [trimester] and they could take art. With semesters we no longer have that freedom of moving their classes around like that. The schedules have become a lot more rigid which means that…some students aren’t going to be able to get some of the classes they want.”
The primary reason why many students have had trouble with their schedules is that we have fewer total classes overall, resulting in our schedules needing to be more rigid. It has nothing to do with the counselors or admins, it simply is a byproduct of our first foray into semesters. “It’s because we have to get used to the new way the system works. Being that it’s our first year, we were bound to have some growing pains, but we’ve been taking notes and learning along the way…I think it’ll be much smoother next year and especially in the long run now that we have the experience,” said Mrs. Therrien.
Semesters have impacted teachers as well. With students rapidly switching in and out of classes, teachers are bound to face some challenges early on. “The toughest part really is making sure kids are caught up, you know?” commented Mr. Gresham.
They have a job to do and lesson plans they have to stick to to teach students as much content as they can in the short amount of time they see students. This makes catching up with new students difficult, as they now have to find a way to reteach them while maintaining momentum with the rest of their class. The massive increase in students switching only made this worse and put more pressure on teachers.
“It’s pretty stressful,” says Mrs. Hauselt. “I have to go back and look for old EdPuzzles, print a bunch of classwork pages, assign them old homework- I have to do a lot to make sure my students are caught up. It’s just a lot of work and I didn’t even get the worst of it when compared to other teachers.”
Everyone has been affected by the issues from students, to teachers, to counselors and administrators. It is important to remember that no one is at fault and that the worst of it is behind us. We have the rest of the year to look forward to now that the kinks have been worked out for the most part and the ship is smooth sailing from here.
