Just imagine: it’s a beautiful August afternoon and you open your mailbox to find your schedule for the new school year. You pull out the schedule and find that you have classes you have never even heard of and multiple classes missing. Friends are texting you left and right about how their schedules are not what they should be. You let out a sigh and say, “time to send another email that most likely won’t be answered.” 

It’s a common occurrence here that there is always a problem with schedules. Whether it is a student or staff member’s fault, the first few weeks in the guidance office is hectic. 

Our guidance counselor Mr. Hess says, “The first few days coming back after schedules are released can be very stressful because there are hundreds of requests to change schedules and the phone is ringing non-stop.” 

Senior Eden Moyer has seen a thing or two in her four years here at Knoch. Moyer said, “Somehow I wrote down that I wanted to take gym, and I am now in ceramics.” 

You might be wondering how this happens and why it seems to be a problem every year.

“We go through emails, voicemails, and the Google Forms as quickly as possible to get individual schedules situated,” said Hess. Sometimes it just isn’t possible to make something work in a schedule especially if you have multiple classes that are only offered one time throughout the day. If those courses conflict, there is not much we can do.”

With all the classes kids request, there sometimes just isn’t room for everyone and most likely they will have to be put in a random class to sacrifice for a more important class they have requested. 

Our foreign exchange student Senior Andrea Perez Montaner got to experience her first American schedule. Montaner says, “ I really like my schedule because it is so much different from my spanish schedule back home.” 

Although Montaner loves her schedule because it was new and fun she had problems with it too. 

Montaner says, “ I had a lot of conflicting classes with my schedule that made me have to change it around a bunch. “

Moyer also had this problem: she had to leave for vo tech but Moyer says, “ there were some extra classes thrown on her schedule.” 

Hess said, “We know students get frustrated when they do not get an immediate response from us, because it is stressful to have conflicts in your schedule.”

 The counselors only have so many days over the summer that they are able to work, and that they are not usually working the first week or two after schedules are released. 

According to the way the master schedule is completed is that it all starts with the scheduling packet and course requests in the spring. Then they build the number of sections needed based on the course requests inputted by the students. Skyward has a program that builds the master schedule after they input all of this information. Mrs. Panzer, Mrs. Graham, and Mr. Hess then goes through each individual schedule and looks for trends and conflicts.

Although you may think it seems very easy to have your schedule perfect to your needs, in this article, you can tell it is a little trickier than you think.

Hess says, “ We move classes around to limit the number of conflicts for the majority of students as best we can. We then have to go through and balance classes without interrupting each individual students’ schedule.” 

Trying to fit everyone’s needs to an exact tee can be very difficult, so we need to give our faculty a little more credit. 

Mr. Hess wants to give thanks to the teachers, students, and parents for their understanding and patience through this time. “We have some amazing staff in this building that are willing to go above and beyond for their students no matter what their schedule looks like throughout the day or what their class sizes are,”said Hess. “Some of it is out of our hands, but we do spend a lot of time trying to balance classes and make them as manageable as possible for teachers and students.”