New bell schedule rewrites the school day
In the 2022-2023 school year, students will find themselves with a new schedule. The schedule, if approved by the county school board will give students a lot more flexibility in their personal schedules. It came about after the new senate bill (bill 328) stated schools cannot start before 8:30 a.m with a lot of new changes joining it, changes enabling a lot more cohesion for the school, and schools alike.
Dennis Crystal, Newbury Park High school band teacher, said, how the committee of school faculty and donors was organized in order to restructure the schedule in order to account for 65 minutes of lost time, creating a rotating block schedule, replacing the 0 period minutes with the seventh period minutes, Crystal said. This means that the terms will not end at a semester, but go year long. Students will still have a block schedule, but they will have rotators every day.
The new schedule enables more students into having more class options that were previously limited to them due to scheduling conflicts. Stephen Lepire, Newbury Park principal, says that the schedule was created with the idea of flexibility. “[The school council] really kind of came down to it as looking at as what’s the best scenario and provide us with the flexibility to be able to schedule everybody in a fair and more equitable way,” Lepire said.
Another aspect of the increased flexibility is the potential for mixing various classes between IB, CP, and specialized programs for increased connectivity between them. Deborah Dogancay, Newbury Park High school’s science teacher and IB coordinator, believes that the new schedule will give students a lot more freedom with their classes. “It opens up our schedule so that people can have a lot more freedom to mix and match all level of class to make a schedule that really is appropriate for them and meets their interests,” Dogancay said.
There are going to be many changes in the coming months based on the pending approval of the school board. “We took the opportunity since we had to change our schedule anyways, to alter it in a way that allows kids to have some flexibility in their schedule,” Crystal said.
