Please Choose Carefully

Now that we are headlong into the scheduling process, I want to take a moment to remind parents and students to choose your courses wisely. For every one of my ten years here at South, we have reduced our teaching staff despite maintaining nearly the same amount of students. That can only mean bigger classes, and the natural result is there are fewer open seats in the master schedule.

Next fall, we will be staffed tighter than ever. We will likely lose the equivalent of more than two teachers, resulting in class sizes that are even larger than they are this year.

In the past, we encouraged students to aspire to coursework that maximized their potential. If it didn't work out, we could make what we call a "level change" to a lower level class with no harm to the student's grade point average. That is no longer the case.

We still want students to enroll in the highest level where they can be successful, but we do not have the same latitude with level changes. The reason is that the lower level classes will already be full.

The bottom line is that we ask students and parents to choose carefully. If upon reading this you feel that your son/daughter may have bit off more than they can chew, I encourage you to contact your counselor to get them placed into the most appropriate class. We just won't have room for these types of changes later this summer when the master schedule is finalized.

We are still making adjustments in the master schedule at this point, and will be for the next month or so. That means we can still adapt to changes in the number of student requests for a particular course. We use these course requests to determine our staffing and develop our layoff list. The Board of Education will approve the layoff list (something no one enjoys) later this month as required by the teacher contract.

So if you wish to make changes that we should be aware of, now is the time to act. Thank you for your interest in helping us become even more efficient.