The first day of school is a coveted event that people of all ages are familiar with. Whether you enjoy school or not, the first day is always a momentous occasion. You get to see all of your friends after two months of summer; you get to find out where your classes are, who will be in them with you, and much more. However, high school is “exciting” for much longer than the first day; it’s “exciting” for the first two to three weeks.
Everyone has classes they want to be in, teachers they prefer, the lunch period they want, and the friends they want to see. Then, once the next school year starts, many people find that they didn’t get this one class or that one teacher, so they simply switch their schedules, but everyone else has the same idea. If you’ve ever been to the Guidance Office or Career Center at Quartz Hill High School during the first weeks of school, you are more than likely to see a massive line of students attempting to change or fix their schedules. The real question here is: Why does this happen every year? How are the teachers and counselors affected? How can we fix it? Well, you’ll find out in this article.
Schedule changes are an issue for everyone, including the teachers. I interviewed Mr. Michael Bauman, an English teacher here, about schedule changes. “It’s tough because I understand,” he replied, “I know they’re necessary, and balancing 3,300 students is hard. Emotionally, it’s gotta suck for the students being pulled out of one class and into another.” Many students believe the schedule changes only affect them, with little thought to how it impacts the staff. However, Mr. Bauman is a prime example disproving this. “I had an entire class added to my roster; they took out one of my support coordinator sections and gave me an English 9 class, which I love,” he responded when asked how these schedule changes have affected him. “I love the class, but it was new. I had to do all of my day one and day two stuff in the middle of week two.”
For me personally, my schedule has changed quite a lot in my high school life. During my sophomore year of high school, I didn’t have a sixth period until the end of the first day. There was a massive line outside the Career Center all day including students with holes in their schedules or classes they already passed.. It was so busy that counselors told everyone that if they wanted a class switched, they had to wait until the next day as they would only take people with holes in their schedule at that time. This year, I switched my first period with my third period and then switched out my fifth period in the second week as well.
Now, who makes the schedule? We interviewed Mrs. Gretchen Vidal, the head counselor. According to Vidal, “We use the PowerSchool system, so it generates all of the course requests you made back in spring and automatically puts classes into students’ schedules. We then go in and fine-tune the classes based on the requests.” This may seem simple until you add all the other factors. In the same interview, Vidal said, “The first two weeks are so hectic because not only are we dealing with over 3,200 students who want to change their schedules, but we also have parents enrolling their students into high school at the same time.” This year, there were over 200 newly enrolled students within the first week.
How can we make these changes go smoother? Vidal suggested having “students send one email and one email only. They’ll send one email at 9:00 a.m., then 9:16, then 9:32, etc…at one point in an 8-hour work day, I had 600 emails where I’d had zero that morning.” While it may seem extremely important to you for your schedule to change as soon as possible, thousands of other students are also trying the same thing. Sending one email and waiting a few days will make your chances of schedule changes much faster than one every ten minutes.
