Lillian Landberg

Illustration by Lillian Landberg

Students always highly anticipate the day their schedules are released, allowing them to compare class periods, teachers and lunches with their friends. However, most students do not know what goes on behind the scenes. For admin, creating student schedules is one big puzzle that requires them to balance student interest, class period conflicts and lunches.

The scheduling process begins in February when students register for their classes for the next school year. From this registration data, which is displayed on Synergy SIS, Associate Principals Gretchen Zahn and Ben Chiri can see how many students are interested in each class. This allows them to determine how many sections of each class to offer to make a preliminary mass schedule.

Zahn inputs the mass schedule into Synergy and runs its scheduling program, which gives a percentage of students who would get a schedule with all the classes they registered for. “So typically, when I’ve run that program in the very beginning, I may only be at like a 58 or a 60% success rate,” said Zahn. “So then I can go in and do reports that say, ‘here is where the conflicts are happening,’ and then I have to go in and start manually shifting.” This data allows Zahn to shift class periods around to create a more successful schedule for all students. After hitting around 85% success on the program, the deans resolve any remaining schedule conflicts with students on a case-by-case basis. 

A common source of schedule conflicts is “singletons,” which are classes that Mounds View only offers one period of the day. This includes many upper level classes, electives and music ensembles. When designing schedules, the admin tries to spread singletons throughout the day to maximize the possibility of students being able to take multiple singletons. The Synergy program helps them determine which period each singleton should be in by highlighting the biggest schedule conflicts. “The other thing that the program can do is tell me that, okay, we have 60 kids conflicting out of Concert Orchestra, and the majority of them, it’s because they also want to take French, so that program can also help us to determine where it’s conflicting out the most, so that we can go in and adjust that accordingly,” said Zahn.

Furthermore, although the admin tries to make class sizes even, it is not always possible due to the number of students who register for a class. When the number of students registered is “over capacity” but not enough to open another section of a class, teachers can either put some students on a waiting list or take on more students per class. “[Teachers] have the ability to say, ‘Yes, I will take 38 or 40,’ versus telling a small number of kids on a lottery, ‘You can’t take it,’” said Zahn. Most teachers opt to take more students, which is why classes like AP Calc BC have 38 students in one class period this year. 

In addition, lunch schedules have to be curated around the class schedules. Mounds View added an additional lunch in 2021, which had to be incorporated in the middle of third period due to overcapacity in the original lunches. Freshman and sophomore classes are sorted into 1st and 2nd lunch, and the remaining teachers are randomly assigned a lunch. However,  special considerations are made for part-time teachers to leave early or for classes like Physical Education, which is always lunch 4 to prevent students from eating before exercising. 

Students may have noticed that Mounds View revised the process for schedule changes in the 2023-2024 school year. Instead of simply emailing deans, students fill out a google form with their reason for request, such as schedule conflicts, PSEO adjustments or enrollment in another course. Zahn created this system to eliminate the unfairness of the old system, where students on a waiting list for a class may not have gotten a spot because another student emailed their dean requesting a change. “It truly is fair versus ‘I happen to get lucky because my dean clicked at the right time,’ and that just felt really gross when that was happening because there were kids that had gone in two weeks before, and they were denied,” said Zahn. 

Although Mounds View admin follows a complex process to create a schedule that works for all students and teachers, their intentions remain simple. “We’re always working with certain priorities in mind,” said Chiri. “The priorities are providing opportunities for kids and keeping things fair for kids. That’s essentially it.”