This year, a new scheduling system was introduced to State College Area High School. It uses PowerSchool, as opposed to Synergy, to create schedules for students and teachers. Synergy, also known as StudentVue, was the program students used to view their grades and schedule.
The new system, like the older variant, is managed by AI. Except this year, it prioritizes maximizing student enrollment and space, meaning the computer tries to ensure students get their requested classes.
The old scheduling system created the schedule by deciding the room and block of classes, then adding students. The new system considers students’ requests before deciding the location and time of classes.
Counseling Coordinator Beth Burnham explained the process. “It’s like a big puzzle, first, the students choose what they want…that helps us determine how many sections we need of each class. So, if we have a lot of kids saying they want, like, AP Lang, and fewer students saying they want English 11, then we’ll have more AP sections than English 11. And the computer program comes up with a schedule for us, and then we look to see what the conflicts are, and then we’ll move classes around manually after that first initial run, and then run it again,” said Burnham.
This way, the system attempts to minimize future schedule changes by ensuring students get the classes they requested.
“The goal is that when you’re doing the scheduling process, you want to have the schedule run at least 95%,” Burnham added. That means the goal is to have 95% of students get the classes they requested.
“Pick what you want the first time because you have the best chance of getting a great schedule,” Burnham said. “When you start saying, ‘I want you to change this class for that class’, you might lose things, like your electives and things like that. So I think [students are] understanding…the schedule is based on your first choices.”
But this leads to potential consequences once the school year begins, because if a class needs to be dropped due to unforeseen circumstances, the rest of the schedule is more likely to be changed. However, Burnham estimates that course change requests have stayed the same or decreased slightly. Thus, this issue has not affected a majority of State High students, and the new program seemingly succeeded in its goal of minimizing schedule changes.
The decision to make the switch was made because, “The product that we used before didn’t do all the things that we needed it to do and wanted it to do,” Burnham said. This was a main factor in switching systems. The main difference is that the new system is student-driven, while the old system was teacher-driven.
“In the past, we would get together as a team of business teachers or social studies teachers or whatnot to come up with your own grid, but [this year] it was given to us according to what you teach and what rooms you taught in,” Jeff Kissel, a Business Law, Finance, Aspire Ed Ethics and Business Law II Ethics teacher at State High, said.
“Each room is specifically designated,” he explained. For instance, students taking business law take the class in classroom E119, and science classes must have labs.
But the reserved rooms don’t always work out. “Some of the setbacks that we have encountered could be, for instance, AI may have scheduled a class outside of our wing and put a study hall in one of our classes in our wing,” Kissel said.
This leads to teachers traveling back and forth between classrooms in different pods, rather than staying in their designated wing.
“It was our first year using this program, and there’s a lot that we learned from using it because [in the] first year using anything, there’s going to be tweaks and things like that. So this coming year will be even better and smoother, even though we thought this year was pretty smooth,” Burnham concluded.
State High is so large, in terms of enrollment and size, that it takes a complex system to organize the movements of its students.
