Westside High School’s counseling department recently made a change surrounding the students’ class registration process. This year, students are not required to meet with their academic counselors in order to get their schedule approved, they only have to meet with their homeroom teacher and parents. Post-Secondary Counselor Lisa Hatch said she thinks this change could be beneficial to students and counselors alike. 

“[The academic counselors] decided that probably 90% of the students that we met with, all we basically do, besides getting to know them again and just kind of catching up, is just look through their cart, everything looks good, so we just basically hit confirm every time,” Hatch said. “Rather than us stressing and them stressing to try to get these meetings done, we decided that it might be a good idea to save a little time. We’re still going to check all the papers, we’re still going to check all the carts and then we’ll have more time to meet with students as needed.”

With this change, students will mostly rely on their homeroom teachers and a list of course recommendations that their counselor compiled to register. English instructor Stephanie Pueppka said she thinks this change has made registration more efficient for homeroom teachers. 

“[The counselors] actually made the process a lot easier this year by just giving all the homeroom teachers a printout of all the classes and then what [their teachers] all recommended that students take,” Pueppka said. “In previous years, we had a big Google sheet that we had to look through, they kind of streamlined that process by just putting it all on one document which is really nice.”

Pueppka said she doesn’t think this change will cause any confusion for students but some homeroom teachers may not feel like they are as helpful as a counselor. 

“Some people I know feel really stressed because they don’t know [about all the various courses offered],” Pueppka said. “They don’t feel like experts about all the classes or they just don’t know.”

According to Hatch, some students may see “See [counselor]” on their course recommendation document when they receive it. Hatch said these are students that counselors would like to spend more time helping.

“If they were missing a lot, maybe they’ve fallen behind, maybe they failed a lot of classes last semester or last year and they’re really behind, then we kind of have to [help them] establish a plan [together],” Hatch said. “Individual cases like that or those that are looking for [a commended diploma] and they’re still missing a couple things, just to kind of talk to them about it.”

While not all students need to see their counselor for this, Pueppka said the option is still there if a student feels it is necessary. 

“If the student had questions that maybe I didn’t feel like I could answer, and that might be about like, if I didn’t feel like I could answer questions about AP classes outside of English or some of the new intern opportunity for juniors,” Pueppka said. “I think the counselors are open, they’re just trying to decide right now, here’s what we need to do versus everybody has to do this.”