Not long ago, the daily schedule that North students all know too well used to look quite different. The Class of 2024 was the first to utilize our current schedule and feel its effects fully in person for all four years of high school. Their experiences shed light on the schedule’s benefits and challenges.
When North used the old schedule, school started at 7:50 a.m. instead of North’s current 9 a.m. start time, and each block met four times per week instead of three. The current schedule began taking shape after a South parent group advocated for a later high school start time in 2014. The city created a special committee in 2015 to develop a new schedule for North and South over four years.
Implementing the new schedule in the fall of 2020 marked a shift for students, bringing both challenges and positive changes. One of the main drawbacks noted by teachers was the reduced number of weekly class meetings, which made it more difficult to cover all the material and maintain the pace of instruction. Despite these concerns, many students found that the new schedule improved their daily routines, particularly regarding sleep. The later 9 a.m. start time allowed students to get more rest and feel more awake during the school day.
“If I had to wake up for school at 7:50 every day, I don’t know how I would survive because I have after-school sports and homework for APs that go at a minimum in the winter until at least midnight, if not 1 a.m. every day,” said junior Kayden Burns-Wong. “I don’t know how I would be able to get enough sleep to function well enough for school and sports.”
Vice Principal Amy Winston added that students seem less sleepy coming to school.
“As someone who stands out in the lobby as students arrive, students are a bajillion times more awake when they arrive in school than they used to be when school started at 7:50,” said Winston.
Additionally, the new schedule’s deliberate decrease in class meetings per week limited the amount of homework teachers can assign.
“Most days, students have four academic classes,” said history department head Gregory Drake. “In the old schedule, there were days when they had seven. And so it was the idea, if every teacher assigned homework every time they saw their students, this means less homework.”.
Furthermore, the old schedule had three 55-minute blocks and one 75-minute block— shorter meetings than the two 75-minute blocks and one 65-minute block North currently uses. According to Winston, this is beneficial to students who have to leave school early for sports. “Because of the long blocks, it is very rare that you miss an entire class,” said Winston.
Additionally, the old schedule contained x-blocks. This block was an equivalent of our current WIN and Tiger blocks, providing students with time to meet teachers and for clubs to meet.
“X-block in the old schedule was twice a week and it was just on a drop-in basis,” said Drake. “So students weren’t obligated to be there, and students could go and see three or four teachers during an x-block—they could just stop in and do one quick thing and then move on,” he added.
Despite the benefits of the new schedule, there are still downsides, both unique to the new schedule and shared with the old one. For instance, although the start time has been shifted later, morning tardiness is still prevalent.
“There hasn’t been a significant reduction in tardiness,” said Drake. “There’s still a real issue with kids being tardy for the first block, even though it starts at nine now instead of 7:50.”
According to Winston, the change from four meeting times a week for each block to three has been criticized by teachers who feel the change has made it hard to teach as much in a year as they did before.
Drake said, “In a subject area like history that’s very content-driven, we just have less time. We haven’t seen a huge reduction in class time, but the number of times that we meet over the course of the year is reduced a lot when you add it up. And I think we’re still trying to figure out four years later, how do we adapt what we do in class? Because we still have the same amount of material.”
According to Winston, the 75-minute block schedule that North currently employs was picked as a “happy medium” compromise between the former hour-long classes and the half-hour classes other schools have.
“One of the unintended consequences of shifting the school day was that students were missing more class time for athletics because other schools in the league didn’t shift,” said Drake.
North’s athletic league used to start their games at 3:30 p.m., but it was adjusted to 4:30 p.m. to compensate for the schedule shift. However, many North athletes still have to leave school early to compete in games.
Administrators added WIN blocks into the schedule to compensate for missed class time, giving students time to check in with teachers.
Additionally, Thursday’s WIN was moved to the end of the day to give student-athletes a buffer between the end of their last class and the end of the day, preventing them from missing classes.
Drake added, “Kids had to leave early and a lot of the games are on Thursdays, and so I think the shift was made so that since so many kids were missing the last block on Thursdays, the idea was that it could be a WIN instead of an academic class.”
Despite this, Golf, Nordic Ski, and Indoor Track haven’t changed their schedules because of restrictions tied to the facilities they use and the external organizations that run them, as well as the amount of daylight they need in the case of golf which causes conflicts for athletes.
“During the regular season, we will have dual meets on Thursdays, which means we almost always completely miss WIN block on Thursdays,” said senior Salomé Laurence, captain for cross-country and a member of varsity indoor track.
Winston said the schedule is unlikely to change soon.
“If there was a perfect schedule, high schools would all have it,” said Winston.
