Coming back from break, students look at their schedules for the second semester and for the next year to see what classes they are taking. If something is wrong in their schedule, they go see their counselors to fix the mistake(s). A mistake is a reason to change a schedule but what else is? What isn’t a reason?

Guidance Office Director Julie Fierce, says that this year there are actually less students requesting schedule changes than last year but it may seem like more because, recently, people just talk about it more. She says that creating schedules for everyone each year and each semester allows counselors to create the master schedule with all the subjects available, how many classes of the subjects are available or needed and the times that they are available.

“Everyone in this department and all the administration would love to say that we’re the good guys and we’re going to let you have whatever you want, but we can’t because we have to keep classes as balanced as we can,” Fierce said. “ It’s kind of the good for all, there has to be some consistency and there’s a reason why we do something. It’s not because we’re not listening to you, because we are listening to you and we want to do whatever we can do to help even if we can’t make that schedule change.”

Fierce says that reasons for a schedule change are changes in class levels, such as switching to honors from regular or vice versa because of grades. She says that the most common reasons people want schedule changes are understandable but are not sufficient reasons for a change in not just one schedule but possibly many others. If one person wants a schedule change, many others will too. The most common reasons for schedule changes are changing a class period to another time, the classes they are currently taking aren’t what they thought they would be or they want to be in the same classes as friends. But those reasons are not good reasons to change many schedules and the master schedule, which will become imbalanced.

She says the goal in schedule changes is to help everyone be successful even if it might not be what most people want.

“We try to keep classes relatively balanced, now what that means is we don’t want a class that has five in it and a class that has 30 and that’s what happens when we start moving schedules around,” Fierce said. “That doesn’t work well. That’s not good learning, that doesn’t help the teacher and that doesn’t help the students.”