In the last few weeks, when summer begins to come to a close and the new school year impends, students all over look forward to receiving their schedules. They intensely plan to add and drop classes to ensure their requirements and rigor-goals are met, and cross their fingers while they wait to find out their teachers and friends in classes. On August 16, Poly students opened their email expecting such a schedule and instead found an update from their deans: schedules had been delayed until August 22. However, just days later, more news arrived that schedules were further delayed until August 26. When the 26th arrived, there was yet another delay; student schedules appeared to be incomplete with missing class information.
Two days later an email from the Head of Upper School Sarah Bates stated, “we realize that many students received incomplete schedules…we will extend the add-drop deadline to Friday, September 6.” Eventually, official schedules with corrected classes after the add-drop period were released on September 23. Due to the various delays, many students were left wondering: What could have caused these delays?
According to Interim Head of School John Rankin, Poly creates student schedules using Veracross’s “cloud-based backup system.” By using this software, student scheduling information is uploaded from the student portal into this system, allowing schedules to be generated. According to Veracross’s official community site, there are four main steps to building a school’s schedule in the Veracross Scheduler: configuring data for Scheduler use, building class schedules for next year, enrolling students in classes for next year, and finalizing and committing the school’s completed schedule. Once Poly’s scheduling information is committed to the cloud that stores it, the information is backed up approximately every twelve hours. However, once faculty arrived back on campus in late August, the system had stopped backing up.
The two members of faculty and staff who were in charge of fixing this problem were Head of Technology Charles Polizano and Academic Data Manager Carol Seeley. Both Seeley and Polizano had to recover and re-upload the missing course information that was lost due to the cloud malfunction.
Despite their hard work, they ran into the same backup issue yet again on September 3 — the day before classes started. Seeley and Polizano were unable to commit everything that had been done between August 26 and September 3 back into the cloud. “We had to work with Veracross engineers to restore information from the backup. That got us about 80 percent of the work, and then we did everything else to get things released to all students by six o’clock that night,” said Polizano. In spite of the technological challenges, Poly was able to provide students with an initial version of their schedules before the first day of classes.
Polizano, Seeley, and Rankin all agree that the scheduling system overall needs to be refined, starting with solving the long-standing issue of the add-drop period. This period is inherently complicated because there are many requests that logistically can’t be met, however, faculty suggests that measures can be taken to improve this process.
According to the official statement made by Head of Upper School Sarah Bates, the add-drop period for the 2024-2025 fall semester lasted from September 3 until September 10. Polizano, Seeley, and Rankin highlighted the importance of communication and understanding between students and deans, as well as between deans and schedulers, during the add-drop period.
In any private school, it’s the school’s objective to offer students a variety of highly specialized courses that pique their interests. For example, Poly offers electives that they classify as “singletons.” These are courses that are only taught by one teacher, in one block, throughout Poly’s seven-day schedule. However, “from a scheduling perspective, they’re a nightmare, particularly, because certain courses are a lot more popular, and you have a large group of people vying for a small amount of seats,” said Polizano.
In addition to the inherent complications of schedule building, the lack of communication provides yet another problem. As Polizano and Seeley diligently worked through course requests, they often reviewed requests that didn’t consider the structure and availability of certain blocks. According to Seeley, “the communication between students and deans is critical. If that doesn’t happen, then that’s just a third complication to schedule…There’s always three or four other moves. Not always, but most of the time, there’s multiple moves in order to add a different class to a schedule.”
When students communicate with their deans, they can make requests that advocate for changes that work within the constraints of their current schedules. Additionally, deans are able to provide guidance on which classes have already reached maximum capacity and which courses will aid students in fulfilling their requirements.
With regard to the future of scheduling, Polizano acknowledged there can be conflicting goals at times. “If the goal here for Poly is to have as diverse an educational program as possible with highly specialized courses, and really kind of pushing as much choice as possible…Well, then that’s one strategy for scheduling. If it’s fairly balanced classes, so every class has 18 students, and there’s a good gender distribution, well, that’s a different strategy. So it’s really from the top, figuring out…what are the academic goals, and then how can we create a schedule that achieves those?”
