Scheduling Committee

Meeting Minutes March 15, 2006

Jeff called the meeting to order and let the committee know that he would need to leave for another meeting shortly.

Jeff presented the data collected from departments. The committee was asked to formulate observations from the data. (Note: data sheet does not have information about Physical Education courses or the varying technical programs needs.)

Discussion with Jeff:

• Need to understand “what it is we are trying to fix?”
• Observation: It seems to be a 50/50 split in terms of yearlong vs. semester courses
• Observation: Seems like the majority of year long course needs are lower level courses and semester courses needs seem to be upper level (with the exception of AP)
• Also the areas where year long courses are desired may correlate with continuity issues
• What if we used 15 minute “chunks of time” to build courses with varying lengths? Seems too complicated for scheduling and would potentially leave times throughout the day where students have nothing scheduled. On the flip side though varying course lengths is desired and could be accomplished through AB schedule or parallel schedules.
• Seems to be a lot of variety in course time length
• “ Is radical change necessary?” We must consider all of the other committee work and academy planning and implementation that is happening

Task: Create a List of what we all can agree upon from the data as it pertains to schedule change:

1. Schedule must have variety in length of daily class time(to meet conflicting needs)
2. All-day Technical programs must have 260 minutes minimum to meet requirements and must start at 8:45 or later to accommodate sending school busing.
3. 45 minute classes seem to be favored by very few courses
4. The group wants visual templates to work with to see how various schedules might work with the data. “ Mock Scheduling”
5. Music in morning block must be addressed and be integrated into the day in a way that there are few conflicts
6. In areas where continuity have been a problem under the 4x4 year long courses seem to be preferred: Lower level math, lower level foreign language, freshman English, writing and journalism, Performing music groups, AP courses and some science courses.

Discussion:

• Kevin Beard shared a schedule model he developed last year where concurrent or parallel schedules work in tandem. The schedule has 60 minute blocks and 90 minute blocks. (Attached)
• What is our committee’s charge? Are we “thinking outside the box” or are we simply modifying our current schedule? Are we working on the theoretical of why or the nuts and bolts of how?