Typically school registration doesn’t take place until later in the year, but due to a desire to get an earlier handle on budgeting, the administration has decided to bump registration up to late November to early January. Each grade registers at a different period of time. This year juniors started registration on November 16, sophomores will start December 8th, and freshmen will begin on January 10th.
Registration for each grade level will last for about eight days and all charge free changes to student’s individual schedules will be available until roughly the end of January. After that period of time, students will have to pay a fee of 25 dollars to make any changes unless it is a schedule conflict, in which case no fee will be administered.
One of the main reasons for early registration this year is to provide a better idea of what classes will run next year and what will have to be cut. The administration is planning to have a mid-February board meeting after schedules for students are completed to make all necessary financial decisions. Another reason is to just simply complete the master schedule earlier this year.
Student counselor Mike Reingruber and Maggie Leiteritz both agreed that early registration doesn’t pose an obstacle for the guidance counselors. They will just get answers sooner than previous years.
Reingruber said, “We know the students pretty well, and we will take the teacher’s words on recommendations.” The bottom line is that it doesn’t necessarily have an effect on the counselor’s ability to choose the appropriate classes for students. However, this is generally the time seniors are applying for colleges, so many counselors are also writing recommendation letters.
The administration is still working on the minimum and maximum amount of people that will be assigned for each class. The board recently approved a policy that a class must have 20 students to enroll or else get a special wavier from the board. PE classes could be as large as sixty students and a social studies classroom could enroll up to 35 students. These numbers aren’t set in stone, this is just a rough idea of the maximum students that will be assigned to each class.
Leiteritz said that class size will absolutely affect the student’s learning ability, as well as teachers’ class management. The more student’s in each class, the harder it is to keep control of the students.
The rush to register and enrollment minimums has also put the pressure on elective classes. The sponsor for Rouser, Cherise Lopez, said that it hasn’t positively or negatively affected Rouser enrollment. It actually helped them plan ahead for promoting the class to other students by having them type out what they were going to say and helped them organize a better game plan then previous years.
