New Schedule At NHS Starts The School Year Smoothly

By Eliza Hallabeck

Last year’s schedule at Newtown High School left a number of students going without lunch on Mondays, but now a new schedule allows all students to have a lunch every day. The new schedule was implemented with the new school year last week.

The eight-day rotation of the schedule blocks classes, and keeps each day at a six-period timeframe. Students can take up to eight classes a semester, and having six classes a day allows periods to be longer, lunch scheduled in the middle of the day, and a five-minute homeroom at the start of the day. For the last three school years, Mondays have had the full eight periods with no lunch period scheduled.

The homerooms are another first at NHS this year, because students were previously meeting with advisors once every other week. Now they see their homeroom advisor every morning, and attendance is taken for the entire school.

Monica Warek, a senior at NHS this year, said she was one of the students who did not have a scheduled lunch on Mondays last year. Every other week she would meet with her student advisor, Assistant Principal Scott Clayton, and she ate food as fast as possible.

One day Mr Clayton asked her why she was eating the sandwich as quickly as she was, and her response was that she had no lunch. Monica said it required her to plan ahead for what she would be eating that day.

When the possibility to form a committee to create a new schedule at the high school came up, Mr Clayton asked Monica to be the student member. There were 11 members in total, and every department at NHS was represented in decided the new schedule.

“I was the only student,” said Monica, “so I think whatever I said people really respected my word.”

The committee created the schedule by looking at solutions from other schools, and by determining what the problems were with the old schedule.

“We sat down and spent the whole day, and decided that day we were going to walk out with a draft of the new schedule,” said Monica.

Monica said she is comfortable with the schedule now that it is in place, because it resembles the Tuesday through Friday schedule the school had in place for the last three school years. Only now the eight-day rotation is marked with letters, but teachers remind students in homeroom what letter day the schedule is on.

“Summer went so quickly,” said Monica. “Just two months ago we were talking about it.”

As a senior on campus at NHS Monica can skip her homeroom with her advisor if she has a free period after it, otherwise it would count as a skip or she would be marked down as late.

“We began planning this back in March,” said Mr Clayton.

He said the school was committed to the idea of having a homeroom, because they wanted a way for students to interact with teachers outside the classroom, have the ability to take the full school’s attendance, and to have an easy way to distribute schoolwide information. He said the teachers at NHS really pushed for homeroom.

“It’s important to be at school on time, and it is only for five minutes,” said Mr Clayton.

The one thing Mr Clayton said the teachers had to become used to was planning their classes out further in advance, because the schedule does not rotate on a weekly basis anymore.

“It’s not a Monday anymore,” he said. “it could be an A-Day or a C-Day.”

Monica said she noticed the freshmen on the campus were interacting well with the schedule, because they had less to get used to from their old routines.

Dom Fedak, a freshman this year, said the schedule was similar to what he had at Newtown Middle School last year.

“I think it is fine,” said Dom, who added that the only difference from the middle school was the homeroom every morning.

Overall, Dom said attending the high school is “pretty fun. It’s more free than the middle school, and I see more of my friends.”

“[This schedule] is probably the best solution to solve all the problems that we had,” said Monica.

Mr Clayton said multiple teachers have communicated to him that the homeroom meeting every morning is going well.

Newtown High School Principal Charles Dumais said the new schedule “seems to be going fantastic, and so does homeroom.”