Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Factors Driving Reconsideration of the Current Schedule


The current schedule at Homestead allows students to take up to seven half-credit classes in a given semester.  Teachers teach six periods per day, up from the five that they taught three years ago, a change implemented as a cost savings measure.  While the current schedule is familiar to all of us—in fact, we adults may have attended high schools that employed a similar or identical schedule—many at Homestead have raised questions about the manner in which we currently organize our time.  Does an arrangement in which teachers carry a load of six classes per day (coupled with increasing class sizes) allow them to be their best for students on an everyday basis?  Does the current seven-period day structure afford students sufficient opportunities to enroll in classes of interest to them?  Does the current schedule best allow students to balance their increasingly full schedules, which include academics, co-curricular activities and sports, community service, jobs, and the like?  The list goes on.

Considering these questions and many others, the HSST identified three primary features of any possible schedule:  (1) it facilitates collaboration among teachers during the school day, (2 ) it alleviates the professional challenges associated with teaching six classes per day, and (3) it addresses students’ needs as learners, allowing the maintenance or improvement of school-wide student achievement.  These considerations--along with the question of cost neutrality--are the filters through which all schedule ideas or suggestions must pass.  The three criteria help to keep us focused on our most pressing needs as we continue to investigate the options available to us.

Time Line for Possible Schedule Change

Whenever the topic of a possible schedule change comes up, one of the first questions asked of me is,
"If we have a new schedule, when will it go into effect?"  If a new schedule is recommended, the intention is for it to be implemented in the 2012-2013 school year.  Current juniors and seniors will have graduated by that time, meaning that this year's sophomores would live and learn in the new schedule during their Senior Year.

The HSST is scheduled to complete its study by May of this school year.  If the study process results in a recommendation to change the schedule, that recommendation will be made to the School Board and the Negotiating Team for the teachers' association.  Assuming that those groups can come to terms on contract language that would be necessary to implement the schedule, school officials and faculty/staff would have the 2011-2012 school year to plan for the new schedule, which would go into effect in September of 2012.

Blog Kick-off

Welcome to my blog, a line of communication created to update interested stakeholders on the work of the Homestead Schedule Study Team (HSST), a group of administrators, School Board members, faculty, students and parents charged with investigating cost-neutral alternatives to the current bell schedule here at Homestead.

As time is one of the greatest commodities in education, decisions about how we organize it are of high interest to nearly everyone connected with a school.  With that thought in mind, I created this blog, a tool that will allow individuals throughout the Homestead community to remain updated on our schedule study and recommendation process.  While parents, students, and faculty/staff members will have plenty of opportunities for face-to-face conversation about this topic, the blog is just one more tool that can allow people to remain informed about this work.

Thanks in advance for checking this blog regularly.  Please consider marking it as a favorite--without a doubt, it will be a spot of interest for many of you in the coming months.