BLOCK SCHEDULE: Principal apologizes, responds to parent concerns

“It’s impressive for me to see a large part of our community invested and interested in what’s happening in our school,” Anderson said. “Our intention was to get to students and parents in May, and that didn’t happen… I’ve learned from that, I want to apologize for that.”

Anderson also invited parents to play a larger role in shaping how the schedule will look at the high school. More than 100 parents, teachers, and students attended.

“I would like to invite some parents onto the committee,” Anderson said. “We would love to have parents and students involved in that conversation.”

He continued to reinforce the core principles that drove the committee’s search for alternate schedules, CORE 24, schedule equity and increased options, and stress reduction.

The committee is concerned about the state credit requirements that will be enforced on the incoming freshman class. The class of 2022 will need 24 credits at the minimum to graduate high school, the maximum credits possible to earn at WHS, excluding zero period, online, and summer school options. Committee members believe that more class offerings, a maximum of 32 during the normal school day with block scheduling, will buffer the WHS graduation rate and provide more elective opportunities for students.

“You have more options within this schedule and opportunities for interventions,” Anderson said. “If you want to move quickly in certain areas, it allows you to do that.”

Parent representatives responded, during an anonymous audience-response section, to the graduation requirement by asking if the schedule would necessarily have to implemented next year, suggesting that more time could be taken to better implement a new schedule.

Anderson said that a “gap year” would be considered by the committee and said that no parts of the schedule were set in stone yet.

“We don’t have all the answers right now,” Anderson said.

The second goal the committee had was to provide more opportunities for both struggling and high-achieving students.

“It’s for us to serve students with more remediation and rigor,” WHS assistant principal Donna Moser said. “The committee was very concerned about every student.”

Washington Elementary School English teacher and parent Annette Mueller responded to the solutions for struggling students proposed by the committee.

“If students are taking a full block of remedial English, a block of remedial math, remedial science, that’s basically their entire schedule,” Mueller said. “I fail to see how this helps those students.”

Mueller teaches students whose second language is English. She continued by saying that the schools visited by the schedule committee have different demographics than WHS.

“They can’t compare schools with completely demographics than ours to support their claims,” Mueller said.

Tolland High School in Connecticut, a school selected by the committee to learn about 4×4, has an eight percent minority population and a seven percent economically disadvantaged population, according to U.S. News. Wayzata High School in Minnesota, another 4×4 school research by the committee, has a 25 percent minority population and 13 percent economically disadvantaged population. WHS has a 47 percent minority populations and a 53 percent economically disadvantaged population.

The third issue the committee hopes to address with the 4×4 schedule is the amount of stress students have to deal with.

“Our counselors have seen a tremendous climb in stress levels over the last few years,” Anderson said. “When we spoke to students [at Wayzata], they felt that the stress was lower because they had less academic courses at a time.”

Parents were skeptical of the reduced stress, as a year-long class under the current schedule loses 10-15 percent of in-class time when moved to a semester-long class in the 4×4 schedule.

Anderson countered by saying that the quality of the time in class is more important than the amount of time spent.

“It’s about the quality of instruction that is given,” Anderson said. “I think our teachers continue to get better at teaching in extended periods of time… We have some fantastic things happening in our classrooms.”

Parents were then invited by Anderson to observe block schedule classes and see how the longer class periods will be taught.

Anderson said the same presentation will be given during Open House on Sept. 27. The schedule committee said that they will meet with parents again in October.