“At St. Teresa’s Academy, no two schedules are alike; each student is unique and carries a schedule created especially for her. A student leaves St. Teresa’s with considerable experience in decision-making and self-direction of time.” This is what the STA website states about the modular scheduling that we have had in past years.

This year, although the schedules are designed specifically for STA, they are not designed uniquely for each student. Monday, Wednesday and Friday’s schedules are almost identical; Tuesday and Thursday’s are as well.

This means that most days you will have class with the same people, rather than having class with different people everyday. Students will now move with the “same homogeneous group.” This does not benefit the STA student. By having class with the same people almost every day, exposure to different opinions on certain topics is limited. Students lose the opportunity to learn from more people in their grade. Educational chances will be lost because of PowerSchool.

Before PowerSchool, any given student had an average of 40 different classes with 40 different groups of people each week. Now, each student only has eight different classes, meaning there is less of a chance to expand from their comfort zone and interact with different people. Because of this, it will be harder for each grade to really bond like grades in the past at STA.

The administration should continue to work toward mixing students within each class to keep the bond among the sisterhood. According to their website, PowerSchool is “designed to accommodate…the most complex schedules,” so they should be able to accomodate STA.

Due to the use of the PowerSchool scheduling system, STA has lost one of its major selling points to prospective students: STA has lost a schedule that gives girls opportunities to meet more students in their grade or from other grades and to grow closer as a community because of everyone’s diverse schedules.

STA’s new student management system, PowerSchool, that has changed the schedule, beginning this year. photo by HANNAH WOLF

As a part of St. Teresa’s “Going Global” campaign, the administration has purchased a new student management system called PowerSchool. Unlike the old system, SASI (Schools Administrative Student Information), which was hosted by the school’s server, PowerSchool is hosted by Pearson Learning Solutions, allowing STA to branch out into a web-based environment, said principal of academic affairs Barbara McCormick.

However, PowerSchool cannot conduct students’ schedules in a way consistent with scheduling in the past.

As opposed to each student rotating into a new class with different girls each period, students will now attend each course with the same group of people every day.

“Take Algebra II, there might be three different sections, but each of those sections remain the same group of girls that attend each day, no matter what time of day they go,” McCormick said. “Which is similar to college life, because when you go to a course, you’ll go with a cohort of students, at least through that course.”

According to McCormick, the administration initially believed that PowerSchool could shuffle students within each course, but after purchasing the system, found that to be untrue.

“The system can’t do what we had thought it could do…in mixing up the girls,” McCormick said. “It said that it could when we had purchased [PowerSchool], but when we actually put it to work, it did not come out that way.”

McCormick said she has received mixed reactions from parents and students, but most of the teachers have been very positive.

“It’s easier for [teachers] in their planning,” McCormick said. “In the past, the same group of girls were never in the same class until seven days later, so if you tried to do a project you could never come back to that project for another seven days, so it was challenging.”

Senior Lilly Kraus agrees with McCormick, but admits to initially “hating” the system due to less class variety.

“I loved STA’s unique scheduling system,” Kraus said. “I loved that no other school had anything close. As a freshman I met many of my now best friends as a result of the different mods and I had the chance to get to know most of the girls in my grade during my first year. I think it was one of the reasons we are close as a class…that is something that this freshman class will miss out on.”

McCormick said most parents’ concerns were that their daughters would no longer have frees, but PowerSchool “did not impact that at all.”

According to Kraus, now that the specific changes in the students’ schedules have been clarified, the system is more understandable.

Still, Kraus said, she wished PowerSchool was introduced and explained last school year.

“When putting our classes [together] in the spring, we were told that nothing was changing besides the name switch from ‘mods’ to ‘periods’,” Kraus said. “If such a big change was being made, it should have been explained to us during the year…after all, they are our schedules.”

McCormick said the administration is looking into ways to mix students for upcoming years, much like the old scheduling system.

“We’re looking at more ways in the future to create more of a rotation of the periods, so there isn’t so much of a pattern,” McCormick said. “Now is this year set? Yeah, because we have to start school. But can we see if we can tweak the system? That’s what we’ll be looking at throughout the year.”