Schedule Change

Nathan Malamy | nmalamy27@dtechhs.org

A dedicated team of four students, two parents, and seven teachers and administrators are working to discuss changes to the school schedule for the next school year. The team consists of freshman Lily Moriarty, sophomore Ashwin Raj, junior Shikha lyer, senior Ignacio Loaiza Sandova, parents Wendy Kwok and Becca Ackerman, and teachers Eric Silva, Henry Lonneman, Karen Atkinson, and Maxwell Cady. In addition, staff members Vicki Zettler, Courtney Gomez, Claudia Rask have also joined the team.

Teachers have raised concerns about the cycle system, arguing that students have to relearn what they covered in the previous cycle, which leads to hardships, primarily in math and language classes. Teachers report that students have also brought up that they struggle with the current system. The team is following the design process and is currently gathering information from the school. The recent survey regarding the current d.tech schedule was part of that process. The question that Ms. Contreras says they are building off of is: “How do we best use our time to meet our goals?”

We should be expecting focus groups soon. For the focus groups, each advisory will choose a group of students to represent the class and they will be asked questions from Katie Feifer, who is a professional at conducting focus groups. Feifer will conduct the interviews and will then pass on the information to the team.

During intersession, the team will brainstorm ideas and come out with a few prototypes. With that, it is possible that we may have a final schedule after or around February intersession.

If you have any concerns, questions, or suggestions, talk to or email your representatives, Lily Moriarty, Ashwin Raj, Shikha Iyer, and Ignacio Loaiza Sandoval; or send me, Nathan Malamy, an email and I can pass it on to them. 

I, for one, am very excited to see how this plays out.