With the start of the 2023-2024 school year, many students find themselves fighting for the perfect schedules they dreamed up over the summer. However, due to CHS’ schedule change policy, this consistently proves to be an uphill battle in which every potential roadblock stops students from making any sort of progress. With a few changes though, many of these problems would cease to exist.
The current CHS practice is to release students’ schedules on Aeries the day before school starts in the fall. At RACI, students are only given the courses they will be taking—not the periods or teachers of these classes. Then for the next three school days, schedule changes are all but ignored until week two.
During these three days, it is typical for the academic counselors to hear students’ issues during nutrition and lunch. For the most part, only problems such as a missing period are dealt with as the administration makes it very clear that schedule changes will only start to occur on the second week of school with requests ending at the end of the third.
With the 2023-2024 school year specifically, since there is a problem with class sizes being too large, over Labor Day weekend, more class sections were added. This meant that students whose schedules had already been fixed were messed up again, leading to even more change requests with far less time to honor them.
Between the late release of students’ schedules and the refusal to change, it is no wonder that almost every student has at least one issue with their classes. Since this problem occurs every fall, it is apparent that the schedule change request policy must be changed.
I would like to be clear: this is not a direct issue with CHS academic counselors Emily Ritchey and David Rivas; this is a systemic problem within LVUSD. Whether or not this system has flaws, CHS needs more than two academic counselors. The fact that this LVUSD system is problematic is only made worse by the fact that the district, for a reason that has yet to be made clear, has not determined that CHS needs more academic counselors.
As it stands, the week before and the first three weeks of school are incredibly chaotic for CHS students. At RACI, students are given their courses in alphabetical order without teachers. If there are any problems with this, students have to fill out a Google Form to request changes. At this fall’s RACI, no counselors were present to answer questions or to make requests that coincide with the schedule change form. Then students must wait until the day before school starts when schedules with teachers are dropped on Aeries. However, they are unable to make change requests until the following Monday. This causes problems for both students and teachers as students get behind in the classes they eventually switch into and teachers feel they can not truly start teaching until schedule changes are ironed out.
Starting with the second week of school, the counselors are overrun with change requests, making the process understandably slow. To add fuel to this multi-week fire, schedule requests stop at the end of the third week of school, limiting the amount of time the incredible amount of these changes can happen.
Since students only get their schedules the day before school starts, all problems regarding such schedules are addressed mere hours before the semester begins. This is made worse by the fact that LVUSD decisions make it so that CHS only has two academic counselors making course request changes. If schedules were released mid-summer or at the end of the previous school year, there would be no mad dash to email counselors with said counselors no longer being bombarded with emails and becoming overworked. This would give CHS counselors multiple months, instead of minutes, to adequately address each and every student’s concern.
This change would also eliminate the problem of students being stuck with a schedule they know they are going to change for the first three days of school or longer. Such a change would get rid of so much stress for both students and staff, which is incredibly important when everyone is already dealing with first-day jitters.
Additionally, students should be allowed to make schedule change requests for different periods or teachers for the same class. Many students know that they can not handle a certain class right before lunch, or a certain teacher first thing in the morning. CHS should, within reason, try to accommodate all requests.
Keeping the current policy will only continue the stress and scheduling issues that already so frequently occur. LVUSD needs to allow CHS to make a change in policy like this to help everyone on campus as they start getting used to school again.
