Scheduling Behind-the-Scenes

Every spring, Upper School students submit course requests for their schedules the following year. Much goes on behind the scenes to ensure every student can take the classes he is interested in.

Long before students request their courses, Gilman’s scheduling team — math teacher Camila Vasquez and Associate Director of College Counseling Matthew Herman—collaborates with Academic Dean Jason George from BMS and Upper School Scheduler Kate Feiring from RPCS to create a grid of all the classes and when they’ll take place. Schedulers consider essential, minute details like avoiding having teachers teach three class periods in a day or ensuring that all three schools do not offer courses like AP AB Calculus during the same period. The scheduling team uses Veracross to track the periods in which certain classes will take place. 

Creating a grid also entails considering the offerings that change from year to year. For instance, Mr. Herman explained, “We talked about trying to coordinate AP Chemistry at Bryn Mawr and Roland Park to give our guys more of a likelihood of getting into AP Chemistry. Because they had extra spots available, they said, ‘Yeah, we’re happy to try it this year,’ so it is a really good partnership between three schools.”

Teachers also add new classes or drop old ones. To propose a new course, a teacher must pitch a course to their department chair. Department chairs consider the course itself and the teacher’s greater load. The department must also ensure there are enough sections of core courses before creating new electives. Ms. Bhalla (a News advisor), for example, offered to teach a sophomore English elective and had to drop a section of English 10 which College Counseling’s Anne Mickle will pick up. Finally, the teacher must seek permission from the scheduling team and Mr. Ledyard before it is offered. 

The scheduling team’s primary goal is to provide students with many opportunities, but perfect choice is impossible. Mr. Herman adds, “We really do want to get you guys in every single class that you want, and it’s really hard, and for a lot of guys, we are successful, but sometimes, we aren’t able to get the free period or that English elective right.” For underclassmen, schedulers use Veracross to place students manually, prioritizing courses with limited availability. “If you are taking Chinese across the street in ninth grade, we need to know what period that’s offered at Roland Park,” Mr. Herman explained. “It’s the single classes that are offered that get loaded first, and then we fill out from there the remaining required classes the student needs, like English Nine and World Cultures.” For seniors, the scheduling team conducts a lottery system to determine which students receive their course choices. This is because they have a wide array of options, from AP courses exclusively at RPCS to intriguing senior English electives like Dystopian Fiction with Kelsey Carper. Students can construct their schedule from the ground up, taking the classes they want while keeping a few requirements in mind. 

After students submit their course selections, Gilman’s scheduling team sorts them into courses for the upcoming year while keeping enrollment within limits. Currently, the maximum number of students in any class is 18. However, some courses, like Photography with 12 students, have fewer than 18 seats because of classroom constraints.

What about courses without enough sign-ups? At Gilman, if the course is in its first year, the scheduling team tries to provide leniency, allowing a class to run even with fewer students. “When I offered my Historical Fiction: America class,” Mr. Herman said, “the first year I taught it, I had five students. They didn’t know the teacher, and they didn’t know the course. There was no word of mouth.” Courses that repeatedly fail to attract students are dropped. 

When the school year has begun, the add-drop period is another feature of the scheduling system that allows students to find courses they want to take. Sometimes, students realize a course is not for them and want to swap to a different class. For the second semester, students had until Tuesday, January 28, to add or drop a second-semester course. This period (which is first come, first serve) essentially gives students two classes to take a class and decide if they want to continue. However, the scheduling team must ensure that students’ new schedules still meet their graduation requirements.

Behind the scenes, the scheduling process is much more complicated than many students might expect. While scheduling may not work out exactly how all students imagined it to go, the process is designed to make a complex system work out. It takes a lot of diligence and persistence from the scheduling team to ensure that everything runs smoothly and that students can take the courses they want.