Our current bell schedule will soon be scrapped in favor of a new one where students can assign themselves a tutorial for a class they are struggling in or a teacher can assign students a tutorial for their class using the 5-Star app, which only works on a phone.
The new schedule will have 100 minute long block periods with a 40 minute assigned tutorial after the first block of each block period.
Monday’s schedule will change to allow students a time before third period to “SaddleUp,” or choose tutorials for the week. That will be 15 minutes. After that, there will be a 10 minute passing period, which effectively will be another break before third period.
With this change, teachers will have the opportunity to vote on three different schedule options, one where lunch is longer but school ends at 3:20 second option where school ends at the same time but lunch is two minutes shorter and a third where lunch is 30 minutes long but school ends earlier at 3:15.
The last time the teaching staff voted on a bell schedule they were presented with keeping the current model as well as a new one. The vote was split 50-50.
However this year teachers are not voting on whether or not to change, simply how the change will look in terms of lunch and end of the day.
“We need to have a dedicated intervention time so that we can address the needs of students within the evidence based grading model and be aligned with the other comprehensive high schools,” said Principal Cina Abedzadeh.
Benefits of assigned tutorials are that students can easily make up or retake any test they might have by signing up. The current tutorial system only gives students twenty five minutes with the new system of assigned tutorials students will have enough time to complete a test. The new plans call for a longer period of time, making class periods shorter.
Another benefit would be a proper testing environment, as teachers can only let students who need to take a test be in their tutorial and teachers can no longer ignore limits on direct instruction through tutorials with their lesson.
A sacrifice in abandoning the current bell schedule is that some flexibility is lost. For example if there is a car accident that prevents students from going to school on time, teachers were able to move their tutorial to the start of the period, which prevented students from missing instructional time.
Additionally, students may feel rushed to complete their class assignments as they will not have the extra 25 minutes at the end of class to complete their work. Although an assigned tutorial may enable teachers to help specific students, it doesn’t fit for all kinds of activities. For example, if a student working on a science lab didn’t finish in time, they would have to come back during their assigned tutorial to finish the lab. And that isn’t always possible because some labs can only be done in one continuous class period.
The change may be hard for certain classes that may have difficulty operating properly, such as AP Gov./AP Econ as well as CCA classes like Virtual Enterprise and Stage Craft because they rely on the extra time given by tutorials to ensure all their work is completed. The goal of a CCA class is to simulate students working a real occupation.
“You need tutorial for extra time for class assignments,” said Jaycobe Macabale, expressing concern about the change.
