Administration makes changes to high school schedule

The high school administration made many changes within the building this year in regards to how the school runs due to conflict in the past and a want for more efficiency. 

The main things that have changed include the schedule change policy, bell schedule, the time of the announcements and a new rule concerning lockers. 

In the past, there have been misunderstandings between students and administrators over schedule changes. Students would pick classes and then switch out after only a week or two experiencing it. Principal Dr. Andy Peltz said, “People were trying out classes instead of actually registering for the classes they wanted.” 

Peltz explained the issues staff would face with schedule change. Students’ lack of commitment to their chosen classes led to more moves than could be handled by the counselors.

“People were trying out classes instead of actually registering for the classes they wanted,” Peltz said. 

This makes it difficult for counselors especially, as they are the people in charge of placing students in the classes they picked. With everyone changing their schedules all of a sudden they had to quickly decide where to put each kid.

“[The schedule change] created a huge amount of chaos in our balancing our numbers within class periods, staffing concerns, the number of hours our poor guidance counselors have to come in multiple days over summer to get schedules done,” Peltz said.

When elaborating on his reasoning behind this new rule, Peltz mentioned one of his expectations of Revere Students, which is that they should follow through on their decisions. 

“One of the goals of the Vision of A Minutemen is perseverance and adaptation…Give it time, stay the course and you’ll be good to go,” Peltz said.

Overall, he believes that Revere students should fight to learn and work hard to achieve the goals they set for themselves. 

Revere counselor Nick DePompei ensured that the effects of this new rule have been mostly positive. DePompei is able to look to the future and see how students’ decisions will play out in regard to college or career hopes. 

“We have a lot of people that have stayed in classes and are going to be successful,” Depompei said.

Joanne Gillette realized the wasted time in the mornings and voiced her observations. Sometimes the announcements were not uploaded on time, and most days assistant principal Doug Faris and Peltz had to go on the loudspeaker in the afternoon anyway to say a few more things. This led to the decision to change the time of the morning announcements. 

Nicholas Kos, the teacher in charge of the video announcements, agreed that having announcements at 7th period would work better for his class and the school in general. 

“At the end of the day it seemed like a better fit,” Kos said. 

After Faris started looking into the idea, he realized that moving around the times of the announcements would allow the schedule to be easier to follow. Peltz gave some context as to exactly what was running through the administration’s mind at the time.

“We were trying to be efficient on our timing to make sure announcements were up and running, less interruptions in class and when we had the opportunity to make things end [on] fives we figured it was just easier for everybody,” Peltz said. 

 Kos also relayed that this decision was made on the basis of many ideas and opinions. 

“Every teacher in the building had some kind of input,” Kos said. 

Lastly, students will have the same lockers throughout their entire high school career. This was a decision made by the administration based on community and simplicity. Peltz hopes that students will be able to grow longer lasting relationships with the people around them if they don’t change locations every year. He expanded on the simplistic portion. 

“We don’t have to change the locks every year… anytime we have to go reset, that’s the number of person hours to go in and reset all the locks,” Peltz said.

By maintaining the same locker for their whole high school careers, students will be taking a huge time burden off of the administration. 

Peltz also hopes it will inspire students to take better care of their lockers moving forward.