Unexpected schedule changes greet UPrep students on their return to school after years of relative uniformity

For the most part, University Prep’s schedule has remained the same since its installation many years ago. While minor tweaks have been instituted over time, recently a few large changes have caught the students’ attention.

Grey (flex and late start) days have swapped places with green days, making Thursday the new grey day and Wednesday the new green.

Also, during certain times in October, school days will “roll over” the weekend. This means that if school were to end on block one, the next week would not re-start with a blue day, but continue on with block two.

Out of the two changes, the green-grey swap has attracted the most attention, mainly from students.

While this change isn’t earth-shattering, it’s large enough that many have opinions on the subject.

“I don’t really like switching the green and grey days because grey days  are late start days and I need my late starts on Wednesdays to get me through the week,” sophomore Jade Buchanan said.

Some students, however, are in favor of the change.

“I actually like [the change] because I’m indifferent [to] the order the days are in but aside from having to get used to it, it’s fine,” junior Sienna Axe said.

While many students have opinions on the change, not many know why it actually happened.

“We have a group called the Instructional Leadership Team, which is made up of all the department heads of each academic discipline,” Director of Middle School Marianne Picha said.

This group is in charge of making decisions regarding the schedule, and they decide each year around springtime how the upcoming year’s class periods and school breaks will be laid out.

According to Assistant Director of Upper School Sarah Peterson,

“Four or five times we had to switch the order of the blocks [in order to accommodate assemblies].”

Because of this, the decision was made to permanently switch the order of green and grey days, at least for this year to create more regularity in the schedule.

This switch is believed to be beneficial because it makes planning these assemblies easier, without conflicting with other planned assemblies, faculty in-service days, etc.

The addition of rollover days was made because holidays, in-service days, etc. caused large gaps between days, leading to a rapid succession of blue days in a row.

The faculty in charge of managing the school’s schedule believed these blue days could be a stress on students, so they decided to roll days over during those times in order to prevent haveing weeks of only blue days.

These changes, while they may initially seem confusing, will actually allow a smoother school year for students and teachers by making planning events easier and providing a more predictable flow of school days, and lessening the jumps between days.

By Micho Matuszewski