Review Class Schedules Tuesday morning

Please be aware

Schedules may change over weekend; review your schedule Tuesday morning

Please remind your students that we can now change their schedules only to make corrections. At this time of year, we CANNOT change schedules to accommodate preferences.

If a schedule requires a correction:

• Counselors are identifying necessary corrections.
• Your student should come to the Counseling Center to submit a Schedule Change Request on Tuesday if any of the following apply:
  • A schedule includes a course your student may not qualify for,
  • A schedule includes a duplicate inserted by the computer program,
  • There is a gap or missing period in your student’s schedule,
  • Your student is registered for a course successfully completed over the summer.
• Your counselor will respond to requests as soon as possible.
• If you have a full schedule, you will need to attend those classes until you are contacted by your counselor.
• If your student has a hole in their schedule (missing a class), the student must come to the Counseling Center during the missing period.

 

Skim material below to understand how student voice impacts the courses we offer & how schedules are made

• Instead of educators selecting the courses we offer, we use student preference.
• We collect student choices at the beginning of the planning process in February and March.
• We create schedules that reflect each student’s choices while we hire those who teach those courses within the resources allocated by the state.
• As we commit to teacher hires and assemble resources, our flexibility narrows. That means we must rely on the choices students expressed in March. We now can make schedule corrections only and cannot accommodate course-change requests.

How do we build schedules?

• To give students a voice, we ask students in March what they would like to study as they build necessary intellectual and life skills.
• We ask students to review the course catalog with their family and to pick classes they prefer, keeping in mind requirements for graduation, their personal interests, and what they plan after graduation.

We cannot guarantee those choices, we can only use them to direct our work.

In April, we tally the requests of nearly 2,000 students, using them to

• identify course offerings that have at least two dozen interested students each.
• create a seven-period day that includes those courses.
• operate within our public funding, which means we cannot offer a course that does not have at least two dozen interested students.

By May,

• We begin with seniors, who have the least amount of time left to fill gaps in graduation requirements. We then work through classes in descending order to freshmen.
• We build a schedule for each student, doing our best to follow their requests.
  • Earning graduation requirements comes first.
  • When we can’t fit someone in their first choice, we move to their second.
  • When we still can’t honor requests due to limited space or a course we could not offer, we place students in a course that will fulfill a graduation requirement or provide a growth opportunity.
• We then release and hire teachers to assemble those qualified to teach the courses that were selected to fulfill student requests.
• As this window for hiring closes through the summer, our ability to shift course offerings to meet demand narrows to the qualifications of the staff we have hired.

What causes schedule CORRECTIONS?

As September approaches, in order to make room for everyone, including students who continue to join us through October and beyond, we must use the following order of priorities to shift students among

• the courses we can offer,
• the courses they need, and
• the courses they requested.

Circumstances change for many students after course selections in March, for example:

• Some students do not pass a course and must either retake it or find that they cannot take a follow-up course that requires the failed course as a prerequisite.
• Students successfully complete courses over the summer months so we must remove those classes from their schedule.
• About 100 students whose choices helped drive our schedule will leave the district.
• About 100 new students with different needs enroll at Newport and must be placed in the classes required to advance toward graduation.

The mold is set

Since we must start school in September and we must make the hundreds of corrections noted above, our window closes to all except required corrections.

To accommodate the corrections, we will need to make some changes to the classes we offer, and as a result, many students’ schedules must change to make room for corrections:

• We cancel classes that we can no longer fill and shift those students to other sections of that course or something new.
• Depending on the student’s grade, the prerequisites they have, etc., there are limits to where we can move them.
  • We cannot overfill a class.
  • We must place first the students who need the course for graduation.
• We add classes where we must, and when we can fill them, to allow students to meet graduation requirements.

Students may continue to see changes through the first weeks of school as we make room for new students who arrive at Newport.

Visit our Counseling homepage to find your student's Counselor