Every year in early September, the nearly 1,500 students who attend IHS eagerly open up SchoolTool to take a first glance at their schedule. For some students, it is an accurate reflection of the selections they’d made the year prior. For others, however, their schedule is error-laden—a dropped elective, an unexpected level change, or even the absence of a core class. These oversights create undue panic for students and an extra burden to the counselors, who become overwhelmed with requests for schedule changes in the beginning weeks of the year. With the additional uncertainty of next year’s scheduling due to the new Ithaca Teachers Association contract, it is crucial that both students and teachers are given more information about their schedules on an earlier timeframe. The Tattler Editorial Board argues that the master scheduling system needs to be updated to accommodate students, teachers, and the Student Services team, and affirm the district’s commitment to fostering students’ intellectual curiosity.
In the late winter and early spring, all rising seniors meet with their counselors, and all rising sophomores and juniors fill out a paper form, to input course selections for the upcoming year. These requests are then input into SchoolTool by the Student Services team before the schedule can be made. Then, the master schedule is generated by a team of administrators using an online scheduling platform created by SchoolTool.
Following course selections, the leaders of each department manually assign teachers to each specific course and section. These decisions are made with teachers’ individual preferences in mind, but as English teacher Elizabeth Crawford put it, “necessity trumps preference”—tight restrictions on certifications for Advanced Placement (AP) and dual enrollment courses make it difficult to honor all teachers’ requests.
Despite the seemingly modern technology used to make the master schedule, the current system has continued to produce the all-out scramble that defines the first weeks of school at IHS. According to Student Services’ department leader, Tiffany Atiba, school counselors are not given information about the master schedule until August, when they receive a “conflict report” informing them if students on their caseload do not get into a course they selected. They are also only paid to work eighteen days in the summer, resulting in the last-minute release each year. Meanwhile, students feel frustrated that the schedule comes out only days before the first day of school, leaving them and their counselors rushing to correct any errors. Due to the astronomical student-to-counselor ratio of 282:1, which exceeds the recommended maximum of 250:1 set by the American School Counselor Association, counselors must manually edit dozens of class rosters to accommodate requests from their caseload.
Teachers also suffer from delayed schedule releases. Only a few teachers are able to view drafts of their schedules over the summer, while a vast majority of teachers do not receive their class schedules until the end of August. This delay can create stress for teachers who are teaching courses for the first time or planning brand-new courses, as they lack adequate time to plan for the coming school year. When patchwork schedules don’t plan for common planning periods or department meeting time, which are especially crucial for those teaching new courses, this stress is exacerbated.
One of the simplest reforms, emphasized by both students and teachers, is an earlier schedule release. “From a teacher’s perspective, I earnestly wish the schedule were released earlier so that teachers of new courses had more time over the summer to prepare and plan,” Crawford explained. This could be accomplished by starting the master scheduling process during the school year, after the drop/add period in the spring. Then, the Student Services team could send schedules in mid-summer, giving teachers the time to create quality coursework and students the ability to adjust their courses as needed.
The current scheduling system also disadvantages single-section electives and classes with low student eligibility. Classes such as AP Calculus and AP Physics C require students to be on accelerated “tracks” for math and science courses, while the Advanced Portfolio and AP Art Courses require two full years of art electives for placement. Single-section electives can also be difficult to align with schedules, leading to students being bumped from classes they requested, which may be a high priority for students pursuing certain college majors or other opportunities. Or, in extreme cases, students are placed in overfilled classes. Although the average class at IHS consists of about twenty students, scheduling issues resulted in harmful outliers like the forty-person AP Calculus BC class for this academic year.
To help streamline the general disorganization of the scheduling system, the scheduling team could switch to digitizing the course selection form. By switching to a straightforward online system that sets limits on the number of credits and classes available to students in each grade, counselors can ensure that the students on their caseload are selecting an appropriate number of credits and levels of rigor. The system could also allow students to mark classes as “high,” “medium,” or “low” priority, so that in the event of a full course section, their most important courses would be prioritized without additional counselor intervention. Additionally, this could allow students to better visualize and customize their path to graduation. If any errors with schedules arise, which may be inevitable, having a digitized version of a student’s selections would allow both students and counselors to pinpoint and resolve the issue quickly.
A solution to the issue of level changes is to program the master schedule so that it schedules different levels of the same class (for example, Regents, Honors, and AP United States History) during the same periods. In the short term, this change would make the influx of level change requests in late summer a much easier problem to solve. In the long term, it would maximise students’ access to rigorous courses and give them more opportunities to challenge themselves academically without repercussions if they need to drop down a level. This would benefit teachers, too—with more overlapping periods of instruction, staff members teaching certain classes could have a shared planning period to collaborate on course material and refine curriculum.
Fixing the master schedule is not purely a matter of convenience. It’s about respecting the time and needs of counselors, teachers, and students. IHS needs to treat scheduling as the foundational academic process that it is rather than a rushed administrative task squeezed into the final weeks of summer. An earlier timeline, thoughtful program scheduling, and a shift to a fully-digital scheduling model would not only prevent the annual chaos that characterizes the first few weeks of the school year, but also create a system that is predictable, transparent, and supportive for all those reliant on it.
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