Have you ever looked at your schedule and felt that overwhelming rage? Your Psychology class has been replaced with Sculpture and Ceramics, you do not even have a math class, and for some reason, you’ve been placed in both Spanish 1 and Spanish 2.

Irvington has an extremely disadvantageous, disorganized student-schedule system that wastes instructional time. On Maze Day, students are usually all bemoaning the various inaccuracies on their schedules. They might not have the AP they wanted  or the elective that they need to stay on track for their A-G requirements. Students who may not be as bold as others may feel too uncomfortable to ask their counselor to get their schedules fixed.

One of the problems with the schedules is that students  feel that the administration is not clear about how students can get their schedules fixed, and who is allowed to get them fixed at which time. One example of this would be how students waited in line for three hours after school on the first day of school, only to be turned away because their scheduling problems weren’t considered to be that major. This caused students to feel a lack of accessibility to their counselors.

Teachers are also upset, as they feel this disrupts the flow of their classes, and causes students to lose instruction time and have to deal with needing to catch up with the class. This can give them a disadvantage compared to other students taking the course.

Ms. Bennett, a current counselor at Irvington, believes that students should be made more aware of what requirements they have to have met in order to be eligible for certain courses, and how best to meet them through more extensive measures, including stapling brightly colored pieces of paper with the requirements on them to registration packets. She also believes that students should be more understanding when it comes to realizing how much the counselors have on their plates, and be more patient. She feels that the fact that students nowadays are allowed so much control over what their schedules say, is in itself, a big deal.

Solutions to this plight are that students can be more understanding of the fact that this school has many students and that they all require attention from the counselors. The school can also invest in a better electronic scheduling program than the one they have right now, and can also possibly hire more counselors in order to lessen up the workloads and shorten up the lines for the current counselors. The administration can also add visibility to the requirements for certain courses by following Ms. Bennett’s advice on stapling bright lists of requirements to the registration packets.