HOPE – A student-centered system of scheduling classes at Hope High School has met with initial success, according to HHS Principal Tommie Campbell.
Campbell reported to the Hope School Board on Monday that the recent “scheduling day” at HHS included a number of built-in features that will make future registration easier for students, parents and faculty.
“I was really pleased with how our community responded,” Campbell said.
He told the board that scheduling classes for the fall semester in the preceding spring semester, as opposed to the summer months preceding, provides more flexibility and certainty in class planning. Campbell said each teacher at HHS is assigned 16 students whom he or she advises in class scheduling beginning in the student’s 10th grade year.
“They are going to have the student and the record of their academics; and, they are going to be the advisor for three years,” he said.
Campbell said that HHS currently has a student population of about 750 students, and a faculty of 60. He said the potential combinations for scheduling across those factors create more than 43,000 specific opportunities. Given that information, Campbell said he surveyed parents about the scheduling process.
“The really good news is that 96 percent of the respondents said the conferences were ‘helpful’ to ‘the best they have ever seen,’” he noted.
Campbell said 170 parents returned surveys to his office. He said the survey results will help HHS better track parental contact by teachers, which Campbell said should improve.
He said the survey showed that in 56 percent of the cases parents had been contacted by teachers from 1-3 times this year, and that in 48 percent of the responses parents had visited the HHS campus at least five times during the school year.