There is much more than meets the eye when creating a student’s schedule. Before students get their schedules in August the staff in student services must create the master schedule. This is the list of all the teachers and the classes they are teaching, for three trimesters.

However, according to registrar Patricia Remondino, the creation of the master schedule was put off due to teacher layoffs.

“We were unsure of our staffing because of budget restraints,” Remondino said. “This delayed the actual process by about a month.”

At the end of last year there were serious talks about laying off quite a few staff members to make up a $3 million budget deficit. Some staff members were laid off, but all of the teachers were called back after some extra savings from heating costs were found in the budget.

Now once the student services staff working to create the master schedule knew how many teachers would actually be here, the schedule could be created.

“It was difficult in the sense that we had to wait until much later in the summer to do the master schedule,” counselor Steve Hewitt said. “This becomes problematic because the computer cannot schedule every student in every period and counselors need access to go in manually and fix holes in student’s schedules and make other necessary changes.”

Even though the schedule was created there is a downside to having to deal with such a tight budget and a limited amount of teachers.

“Class sizes have increased pretty much across the board, which no schools want to do,” Hewitt said.  “At this point counselors and administrators are working to get students the best schedules possible.”

Another downside according to new counselor Steve Evink is the lack of flexibility in the schedule.

“What students should know about making schedule changes is that classes are full and there is no room to move classes in schedules,” Evink said.

With all of the problems and concerns with creating the master schedule many people are still remaining positive.

“It is now up to us to work together and think creatively how to best address these master schedule shortfalls.” Hewitt said. “We have a great staff and we hope we can find solutions to help us as we move forward.”