As the upcoming school year begins, students and teachers prepare for a year of learning, teaching, and growing. However, amongst the students, a new problem has arisen. Students are complaining they haven’t gotten the classes they signed up for.
Rezoning has been very heavily talked about at Loudoun County High School. Last year, it was rumored that students would get rezoned depending on where they live and how much space was available at their local high school.
Once rezoning took place, many students were transferred to different schools; however, some students were able to stay at their current school by filling out a request form.
As the 2022-23 school year went on, this rezoning topic settled as students were offered choices to stay at their current school or be moved to another.
With class sizes increasing, students suspect that rezoning played a huge part in classes offered to them this year.
These rumors, however, were quickly dismissed by Dan Croyle, head of the counseling department, who has been working at the school for 13 years.
Due to reasons like having to change schools or positions, or changing the department that they work in, six teachers were transitioned to different areas of the work field, Croyle said. This difference in the number of available staff brought changes to classes.
“I believe there’s less flexibility with class changes because of the size of classes,” Croyle said. Classes that would normally have around 25 students now had around 31 students.
Scheduling processes for the new school year start in February of the prior year. Students meet with their counselors and discuss their class choices for the upcoming school year.
By the time the new school year rolls around, many students have changed their minds about what classes they would like to take.
“Sometimes students change their mind,” Croyle said. “Once you change your mind, we have an allotment of teachers based on what we talked about in the spring as opposed to what people want in October.”
When students get their new schedules in late August, they see the arrangement of their classes for the upcoming school year. If they don’t like what they see, they go to their counselor, wanting to change their schedule.
However, it is very hard for counselors to change the schedules of so many students at the beginning of a new school year. The majority of the time, students’ schedule change requests are rejected.
“I would say a majority of the students got the classes they wanted,” Croyle said. “So I think there’s a different way of replying [to the problem]. I think a lot of times, students get the course requests they’ve requested, but not necessarily either the format or the sequence of classes they want.”
Students also have preferences for their classes. While most like having classes with their friends, others may prefer to have PE at the end of the day.
These preferences are hard for counselors to work with, especially when so many students have their particular likes and dislikes.
“The upperclassmen get in a pattern of picking multiple things in the spring,” Croyle said, “and then when the new school year starts, they want to pare down and we don’t have that flexibility.”
“It’s like you’re going on a family vacation and you buy four swimsuits, but you really only need two,” Croyle said. “You take them home to see what looks the best and then you want to return the two that didn’t work.”
Many classes are also only offered for one block, due to their lack of demand.
Other activities, such as students attending the Academies of Loudoun, can also affect how classes are offered to those students.
These problems can also be caused by reasons that counselors can’t control, like the amount of classrooms for specific classes, or the amount of students willing to take a class.
“I would also say that there are a lot of things that are under the radar that people don’t realize,” Croyle said. “There are a lot of things that happen behind the scenes, and people just assume we can just change any schedule we want.”
Even though scheduling conflicts will always stay around, it’s important to know that there are a lot of contributors to these problems.
“If there’s an opportunity to offer a class, we did,” Croyle said. “I think it [scheduling problems] happens every year. We do the best we can to get the highest percentage of students that have requested a class in it.”
