During the first week of school, many students experienced errors in their schedules including being enrolled in two classes for one period, not having a lunch or other classes they requested, and being placed in classes they did not sign up for. These problems were because of the complexity of making a schedule.
“Creating the schedule is a long and complicated process. It begins with students registering for their next school year choices,” counselor Amy Aspengren said. “This information is then entered into Powerschool and a Master Schedule/Course offering is created. From there, Powerschool creates schedules for the students based on the requests they had made.”
According to Aspengren, the process of making a schedule has to be repeated around 1800 times. This mass quantity, along with all the factors that are taken into consideration, is bound to create errors.
Sophomore Robin de Jong was one of the many students to experience errors in their schedule.
“On the first day of school I was booked for two classes in sixth period. I went and talked to the counselor and… she said it would be fixed, so I shouldn’t worry about it, but it still wasn’t fixed by sixth period. I sent emails to my counselor, but she didn’t respond until Monday [the 22nd] so I didn’t get my new schedule until then.”
There are many reasons that schedules have complications like this. One of the main reasons is because many classes are only offered 1-2 times a day. When the times offered for those classes conflict with another class, students must make a choice regarding which class they prefer to have on their schedule.
“Think of it as a giant Sudoku puzzle,” Aspengren said, “So many factors go into the scheduling process beginning with the requests, and then class sizes, student body size, state requirements, staff availability, graduation requirements and data from previous years.”
Though it can be a complicated process, not having the schedules fixed can cause problems for students. “I missed two classes of AP world and now I’m super behind because I have the whole chapter one study guide on top of what we’re doing in class right now.” de Jong said.
Though problems with schedules are unavoidable for most students, Aspengren gives suggestions for how prevent them. “Students are encouraged to offer suggestions on how to help the process. And again, we encourage students to take the winter registration process seriously so that the courses they want to take are more available based on the requests given” Aspengren said.