Many students are aware of the new faces in classrooms and ongoing schedule changes at Silver Creek. Our counselors have been scrambling to place students in the right courses, finish balancing overfilled classrooms, and altering the schedules of many students on campus. While some students were safe from the mayhem of schedule changes, many others were not as lucky.
Ashley Ho, a junior at Silver Creek, experienced difficulty with her schedule this year. “When I first got my schedule, my counselors placed me in Math Analysis, a course I had completed over the summer. I asked to switch to Exploring Computer Science and was told to wait until the counselors were available. Once I was finally able to speak to my counselor, they informed me that the class I wanted was at capacity and that I must take Calculus. I ended up turning in an AP form for a class I never even wanted to take.”
Ashley isn’t alone in this. She is only one of the many students whose start of the school year has been utterly destroyed by scheduling mishaps. These unprecedented schedule changes have caused the subjection of students to switch teachers and in some extreme cases, entire courses during the last few weeks. This movement of students has even caused some to fall behind in classwork, tests, and more.
The answer to the sheer number of schedule changes this year lies in the exponential growth of students who have been enrolled at Creek in the past few years. As promising as this increase of student numbers may seem, it has caused a lot of issues such as a shortage of classrooms and teachers to accommodate the courses that students want to take.
Courses like the French 3/AP, Japanese 3/AP, and AP Physics 2 had between 40 to 60 students in one classroom at the beginning of the year, reaching well over the legal safety limit. To solve these issues, counselors searched for another way to move these students into other periods or courses. French and AP Physics 2 were able to address these matters through additional sections and dropped students. However, other students were not as fortunate. Japanese, for example, still had to drop the entire AP class and some from Japanese 3 to even have enough desks for all the students. They weren’t able to add another section since Hutchinson-Sensei, the only Japanese teacher on campus, is already teaching six periods of Japanese when the norm should be five.
The hope is that next year, schedule changes won’t be as hectic and cause as many problems for all the students and staff at Silver Creek. However, we can’t predict what will possibly happen, and one can only wish that our schedules and courses won't be as altered as they were this year.
Ashley Ho, a junior at Silver Creek, experienced difficulty with her schedule this year. “When I first got my schedule, my counselors placed me in Math Analysis, a course I had completed over the summer. I asked to switch to Exploring Computer Science and was told to wait until the counselors were available. Once I was finally able to speak to my counselor, they informed me that the class I wanted was at capacity and that I must take Calculus. I ended up turning in an AP form for a class I never even wanted to take.”
Ashley isn’t alone in this. She is only one of the many students whose start of the school year has been utterly destroyed by scheduling mishaps. These unprecedented schedule changes have caused the subjection of students to switch teachers and in some extreme cases, entire courses during the last few weeks. This movement of students has even caused some to fall behind in classwork, tests, and more.
The answer to the sheer number of schedule changes this year lies in the exponential growth of students who have been enrolled at Creek in the past few years. As promising as this increase of student numbers may seem, it has caused a lot of issues such as a shortage of classrooms and teachers to accommodate the courses that students want to take.
Courses like the French 3/AP, Japanese 3/AP, and AP Physics 2 had between 40 to 60 students in one classroom at the beginning of the year, reaching well over the legal safety limit. To solve these issues, counselors searched for another way to move these students into other periods or courses. French and AP Physics 2 were able to address these matters through additional sections and dropped students. However, other students were not as fortunate. Japanese, for example, still had to drop the entire AP class and some from Japanese 3 to even have enough desks for all the students. They weren’t able to add another section since Hutchinson-Sensei, the only Japanese teacher on campus, is already teaching six periods of Japanese when the norm should be five.
The hope is that next year, schedule changes won’t be as hectic and cause as many problems for all the students and staff at Silver Creek. However, we can’t predict what will possibly happen, and one can only wish that our schedules and courses won't be as altered as they were this year.