Students Planning Their 2022-2023 School Year

Planning a schedule that is repeated everyday

for an entire school year is a monumental task and can require a lot of rethinking and readjusting. Fair Grove High School students undertook this task last week.

For many students, scheduling is an incredibly important moment. Not only do students have to base their schedule off of their plans for the future and determine what classes will benefit them the most, but students also have to make sure not to overload their schedule while keeping up with credits and core classes. There are many factors that determine a student’s schedule, including having classes with friends, preference for a certain teacher, spreading difficult classes throughout the day, picking the right electives, and more.

At Fair Grove High School, students partake in what is called Arena Scheduling. This is a type of scheduling where students pick their schedules through seniority. This year, Arena Scheduling was on the first of April, around two months before the end of the 2021-2022 school year. Students take the whole of the school day to schedule. In past years, students scheduled according to attendance; however, following the years since COVID-19, students have scheduled according to grade point average (GPA).

Students gathered in the gym and were called out by class rank (GPA) to the gym lobby. In the lobby, there were tables where one to two teachers from each department sat with a page for every hour and each class in that department. Some classes fill up much quicker than others, so students often head towards those classes first.

Upcoming seniors schedule first, after every student in that grade is done they went to a different room and the next grade filtered into the gym. When upcoming seniors, juniors, and sophomores are all finished scheduling students will go back to the remainder of their day. Upcoming freshmen did not schedule until a couple of days later. The school counselor, Tonya Peck, met with the soon-to-be high schoolers to brief them on all of the important information to know about scheduling, including what credits you need to graduate, how to graduate with college prep, the different paths you can take, and more.

Students noticed on this day that the halls look much emptier; this is due to the fact that seniors do not attend school on this day. Since they are graduating and have no need to schedule for the next school year, this day is their Career Exploration day, although it has been dubbed by some students as Senior Skip Day since students do not have to be in their normal classes. Anna Newlin (12) said, “I am excited to not have to do arena scheduling because that means that change is coming and I will not be a high school student next year.” She added, “I’m excited for ‘Senior Skip Day’ because it’s something that we’ve always heard about and now we get to do it.”

Meadow Carter (9) explained she is more worried about her schedule than making sure she has classes with her friends. She said she is, “More concerned with my credits and weighted classes. The biggest difficulty for arena scheduling, in my opinion, is sorting everything out the way you want, usually classes won’t go the way you want depending on the hour and variety of other classes and what hour they provide.”

This can be a stressful time for students and can cause many problems, ranging from not having any friends in a particular class to having to completely rearrange your schedule. However, this doesn’t have to be an awful experience. Math teacher Mr. Van Cleave said, “My advice is to keep calm and schedule on!”