With the start of the new year, the switch from first to second semester has caused an issue with some students’ schedules. Dean of students Jordan Rhodes is in charge of the scheduling for every student at Westside High School.

According to Rhodes, certain students’ schedules had not been built, however the problem was not as wide-spread as previously thought to be. Rhodes said roughly 20 students did not have a schedule built, which is about 1% of the total student population. Although schedules not being built have not been common, these sort of mistakes aren’t limited to this year.

“I did end up hearing from one of [the affected students] that this is not the first time that it had happened to him, so it seems to be that there is a group of students within the schedule program [based on their ID numbers] that have an issue scheduling when I schedule all students in as a big group,” Rhodes said. “Individually, they schedule fine, so I had to go back in and [make schedules] when I heard that their schedule didn’t build.”

This is a unique issue. Even past faculty members in Rhodes’ position do not know what went wrong. 

“I’ve met with previous people who worked in this job, and we cannot find a reason why that group didn’t [get schedules],” Rhodes said.” “I’m looking into [the problem] and looking into solutions for it so it doesn’t happen again. In fact, I got a meeting this afternoon [with someone] who can try and look and dig in a little deeper. I don’t know, I’ve never seen it happen.”

In addition, there is no real precedent for Rhodes to follow. 

“The prevalence of [“lost” schedules] this year seems more, I mean, it’s more this year than it’s been in recent years,” Rhodes said.

With the new option of extended campus learning, the scheduling system may have been overloaded, Rhodes said.

“The system that’s building schedules has had tons more information this year than ever before. So is it possible that it connects to extended campus stuff? Yes,” Rhodes said.

For this specific scheduling issue, the counselors were able to get the affected students’ schedules despite the unique scenario.

“In this case, most of the counselors have the courses those students were requesting from the green sheets that were handed out in October,” said counselor Ted Dondlinger. “We just double checked to make sure those classes were correct and then asked Mr. Rhodes to try to get those students scheduled.”

Even though only 20 students were impacted, every year there are many students who have mistakes in their schedule. 

“A counselor has 250 kids on their caseload and they miss one class for one kid,” Rhodes said. “They see Advanced Algebra instead of Advanced Algebra Honors. You’re going to get a kid that says I have the wrong math class. Like there are so many pieces to getting the right information to where it needs to go that [wrong schedules are] going to happen.”

When these mistakes are made, Dondlinger said he makes sure his students are taken care of.

“The situation of some of the ‘lost’ schedules is like many of the situations all of us face every day,” Dondlinger said. “Something goes not how we expect, we default to a conditioned response and then when we have collected ourselves, we figure out a solution. In this situation, when a student and many times their parents are upset, we just take a deep breath and try to be a calming and reassuring voice for them.”