The Department Chairs recently voted 70-49 to accept a new time schedule for the next school year. The idea of the schedule change is to create a schedule where ALL students have the chance to take seven classes.
The math department has been aware of the proposed change, and because of the magnitude of the change and the fact that it will affect everyone at FHS, from the students to the teachers to the administration to the maintenance staff, we felt that more investigation was needed to determine whether the new schedule would better fit the needs of the majority of our students.
With that in mind, we administered a survey to 285 FHS students. From the results, we analyzed which schedule, the current schedule or the proposed schedule, would best meet the needs of the most students. No schedule is going to satisfy everyone so we want to select a schedule that meets the needs of as many students as possible.
We found that the current schedule allows the most flexibility and best fits the needs of the students and the staff. Our survey showed that only about 8.7% of the students are currently taking 7 classes. The current offering of 6 classes with an early bird class satisfies the great majority (about 98.8% of FHS students by our calculations) of the students at FHS because students who don't take seven classes don't have to be here for seven classes.
The proposed schedule will negatively affect the large number of bus students who do NOT want to take seven classes. Since students will be able to take six classes we can envision a lot of loitering in the halls or on the neighbor's property after school by the bus students who don't want a seventh class, yet must wait for their bus. According to the survey, 84.7% of the bus students don't want a seventh class. So, about 204 bus students would not take 7 classes and would be waiting an hour for their bus (about 12.3% of FHS students by our calculations).
The new schedule is going to cost more money to implement than the current schedule. Is this extra cost justified in light of the fact that only 8.7% of our students are taking seven classes?
After all of our investigations, the mathematics department feels that the best schedule for the majority of the students and staff at FHS is our current schedule.