School schedules are a complicated animal to pin down. The nature of course requests ensures that some students will inevitably be dissatisfied with the schedule they receive at the beginning of the school year. However, when all is said and done, a schedule is very difficult to change.
Creating schedules
In the spring, students receive time in their Social Studies class to make course requests for the next academic year. These requests are confirmed at an individual meeting with a school counselor that typically occurs in April.
“Typically the counselor will try and fit everything into the student’s schedule, but if they can’t and it’s between two different electives, for instance, the counselor might call or email the student and say ‘I can’t get both in, which one would you prefer to get in?’ and then they’ll try and honor the one the student wants the most. But there are also those issues where courses get closed out,” said Sharon Gublo, the head counselor at IHS. “After [the counselor meeting], it’s all really up to SchoolTool.”
SchoolTool, a student information system, processes each student’s course requests and attempts to build up the most desirable schedule that accommodates everyone. Restrictions on class size, section size, and certain classes occupying the same sections is what creates the conflicts that nudge some students out of a course.
According to Jean Amodeo, the head of the English Department, SchoolTool uses an algorithm that takes a whole slew of factors, including gender balance, into account. Because of this, the program is optimized towards finding the easiest way to satisfy its requirements. “From what I understand, [the algorithm] goes by seniority, then it goes by required courses based on electives, so it tries to schedule required courses first,” Amodeo said. “The hardest classes to get into are those of single section electives, because they get put in last.”
This year, one such course that concerned a small student outcry was AP Physics C, a notoriously difficult elective requested almost exclusively by seniors. Low student eligibility has restricted the course to one section from year to year. As a science class, Physics C comes bundled with a lab period, making it even harder to fit into schedules.
Carlan Gray, head of the Science Department, said that four or five students were locked out of taking Physics C at one point.
“In the spring, we had around 32 students request Physics C. By [the time schedules were being assembled], there were around 35 students. 35 is a really hard to number to build into sections… there’s both a low enrollment and a high enrollment,” Gray said. According to Gray, max enrollment for a single AP section is generally limited to 30 students, while enrollment for Regents and Honors classes is limited to 28. This means that SchoolTool recognized five excess course requests in the case of Physics C and selected the five students with least accommodating other courses to remove from the class.
The section bounds are more than just a product of pedantry or bureaucratic policy. When expanding sections, teacher expectations change, and along with them matters of money.
“Ms. Lynn [the Physics C teacher at IHS] and I have talked about this a lot. To make another section, I would need another .3 of a teacher salary, which is upwards of $20,000, so it’s not just a thing we can do,” Gray said.
As a result, section size has mostly stayed consistent from year to year, with only dramatic trend changes in enrollment causing shifts.
Sending out schedules
This year, there was plenty of grumbling among students that many schedules were sent home only two or three days before school started. There was a general expectation that schedules should arrive earlier, as they may have in the past, to accommodate preparation, discussion with peers, and ability of students to facilitate changes before the start of school, among others.
What really infuriated some, though, was the unevenness of the distribution.
“There was a ninth-grade Open House and the ninth graders who went to that got their schedules,” Gublo acknowledged. The Open House occurred on August 30. Since many students didn’t receive their schedules until September 5, this constitutes almost a one-week gap between schedule deliveries.
According to Gublo, the compromise between allowing students to anticipate their classes and having the most accurate possible schedule results in discrepancies between who gets their schedules when. In addition to individually resolving scheduling conflicts, of which there were over 110 per counselor this year, the counselors spent the summer processing 79 new entrants to IHS. Gublo said that this year there were changes that needed to be made right up to the first day of school.
“Well, there was some conversation around when the schedules were going to be sent because we are continuing to change those schedules right up to the first day of school, so if you mail those schedules several days in advance or several weeks in advance, that’s not the finalized schedule. And so it happened again this year where schedules were mailed out and then labs, support labs for instance, like AIS Math, and Study Halls, Study Periods were added in, so the first day of school, students were given another [up-to-date] schedule,” Gublo said. “But it varies from year to year; I can remember several years ago the schedules went out in early August. But that was a mess, because we were continuing to fix conflicts throughout the latter part of August.”
The reasoning for the sequencing this year remains unclear. “I think I would like to see where it’s more first day of school, just for accuracy, but that is really an administrative decision,” Gublo said.
Making changes
There is a policy behind what can and can’t be changed in an individual’s schedule once the “final” versions are handed out on the first day of school. To make changes at that point, students must set up an appointment with their counselor at Student Services because approval from parents and teachers must be factored in.
The most common request counselors have to deal with after school starts may be level changes in required classes: changing from Precalculus BC to AB, for example. “A lot of students in the beginning of the school year were coming in to ask for level changes—we can’t do level changes—and we really need to have students stay in a class and see how they do in that level,” Gublo said.
Changing electives, especially AP classes, has been a source of confusion.
“Sometimes a student chooses a very, very difficult group of classes, and if they are going to be unsuccessful in any of the classes because they’ve overdone it, with the decision of the department chairs, the parents, the teachers, and the counselors, if we feel that it’s in their best interest to drop that course, we’ll drop it. But adding new courses; you picked your classes, so as far as I know we haven’t been adding new classes that weren’t picked prior,” Gublo said.
Nevertheless, there have been exceptions, and some students have been able to add new AP classes to their schedule after dropping one or more classes.
According to Gublo, cases such as this are rare and highly dependent on individual circumstances, and require working with the department, the teachers, and the administration in tandem. “We don’t look at it broadly; we look at it more individually for that student’s needs,” she said. About changes based on personal preference in general, Gublo said, “Really and truly, students need to learn to adapt to their environment, so to speak, so we can’t have students teacher-shopping, for instance. Whatever schedule you get is the schedule you get.”