Assistant Principal Dr. Xavier Brown made an announcement on April 27th, 2023 to all students in FLC through google classroom explaining a change in schedule and transition times for next school year. The schedule has been created by James Arleth, the creator of all rosters. In Brown’s announcement, he included a picture of the new schedule and wanted students to compare it to the current schedule and give their opinions on it; should the change happen or stick to the current schedule?

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Sofia Sok

Students pointing to a computer and discussing the changes made to the schedule

There are a couple of changes being and there are:

1. Increasing the transition time to 5 minutes rather than having 3 minutes to transition
2. Lunchtime is 4 extra minutes resulting in 34 minutes for lunch
3. Advisories will be removed making students head straight to 2-3 period in the morning on half days and regular school days
4. Town hall schedule: Advisory is after period 4-5 instead of after period 11-12

Many students may not know why these changes have occurred but Arleth has the answers to most of the questions. It’s still unknown why advisory was removed from the regular schedule and is only on town hall days, but it is known why it’s after 4-5 now.

“Part of the reason that was explained to me was so that we have a consistent start time throughout the week because many students feel that advisory or the town halls can be skipped so we want to make sure that mentality does not begin next year. Part of that is making sure that each town hall is important and that the students feel that it is important as well. So if we put it in the morning, we feared that students would just use that as an excuse to come in late.” says Arleth.

Acknowledging what Arleth says, he believes that advisory should be removed for next year because administrators and teachers fear students will come in at a later time than the school start time.

With advisory gone for the majority of days, the school still needed to put the minutes left from advisory somewhere, and it was decided that the best option would be putting those minutes into lunch and transition time.

“When we got rid of the advisory we had to put those minutes somewhere. So I know that lunch can be very rushed for students and staff alike, so I tried to put all of the minutes into lunch. We feel that lunch time also causes students – or gives students an opportunity to get into more trouble so she (the principal) didn’t want all of the minutes to go there. So we compromised by putting four more minutes in lunch and the rest into the transition times between classes. ” stated Arleth.

Extra minutes left from the removal of the advisory are moved towards lunch time and transition times. They couldn’t put the extra minutes into class time because making class time more than an hour would violate contracts.

“We can’t increase class time for more than an hour or it will be violating future contracts. An hour is the maximum length of classes. We can decrease it from an hour or at least close to an hour because our CTE (career technical education) programs, Business, and MA(medical assistance) have minute requirements that they have to meet each year. So each ER classes have to remain around an hour per period”

Some students have different opinions on this change; some approve but on the other hand, some don’t approve. Let’s hear what these students have to say about it:

College Prep major, 9th grade Casey Tran explains why she prefers the current schedule: “I do like having the advisory because it gives students enough time to wake up and get ready…some students have to wake up at five and six just to get to school and that’s not enough sleep and not enough time to prepare for your day.”

Summarizing Casey’s reasoning, she loves to have an advisory everyday because it gives people extra time to get themselves ready for the day rather than reporting straight to class doing work. With her explanation, she does not approve of the schedule and transition change.

Despite students disapproving of this change, some students approve such as 9th grade college prep major Ly Luong says

“I feel like next year because it’s more organized. twon haWe have five minutes to walk to the class and get to where we need to be. The con is that classes just seem shorter because the time is like one hour or one hour and five minutes and stuff.”

Ly prefers the new schedule because it’s more organized and makes more sense.

Seeing how different students feel/think of this change, it surely might be difficult for Brown and the other administrators to decide whether or not to make the change.

“Students have enough time to get to their class because five minutes you get to go to your locker. Normally you wouldn’t be able to and then increase lunchtime; four extra minutes if you want more time with your friends, that’s reasonable, that’s enough. But  removal of advisories is eh.”