It seemed that the beginning of this school year came upon Timber Creek faster than ever, maybe due to the earlier start date, or possibly due to the fact that the school has more students enrolled than ever before. On top of over 3,000 schedules to put together, there were over 151 transfer students that needed to be enrolled. That being said, it was impossible to get everything done before the first day of the school year. It was then decided that 26 new Timber Creek attendees were to be held from enrolling and attending school until the end of August.
With 151 new students needed to be enrolled at the start of June, the counselors worked around the clock to try and help as many people as they could. Unfortunately, with such a large number of students needed to be enrolled, it wasn’t practical to get everything done before the start of school.
“Each one of these new students takes at least an hour, because you have to fill out paperwork and decide on scheduling”, said Jennifer Williams, Dean of Instruction. “The counselors did enrollment up until the point that school started, but once school started, they were bombarded with schedule changes; thousands of them.”
At this point, it came down to the counselors having to choose between fixing the schedules of the students already attending school, or enrolling new students. Even with a counseling staff of nine, there wasn’t enough personnel on staff to get everything done with so many students in attendance.
“These are people that called right as school started… which is understandable, but it’s just simply a matter of having enough people to bring them in on time”, stated Williams. “The other difficult thing that happened this summer is we moved the schedule up, so people that moved here weren’t expecting school to start this early.”
With a number of students signed up to take advanced classes, there is some question regarding how these students will catch up on three weeks of missed work. These classes waste no time and start learning material the first or second day of classes, so three weeks may seem like a lot to catch up on.
“What typically ends up happening during those first two or three weeks of AP classes, not that they don’t start [with material] right away, but there’s people moving in and out. So, if you have to miss something, that’s probably the best time to miss”, explained Williams. “Plus, the teachers will spend much time with the student trying to catch [them] up. Yes, they are missing stuff, but it’s not as critical as it would be mid-year.”
With 26 students still not able to attend school, it is understandable that the situation would arise some complaints and questions.
With no legal rules being broken, all of the new attendees are expected to start by the end of August. Timber Creek is growing in numbers by the year, and the key to getting everything situated seems to be finding just the perfect balance.
“It’s perfectly understandable, completely. It’s either, take care of the thousands of kids already here that need schedule changes, including kids that need to be in special needs classes that aren’t in the right place, and that is federal law. There are AP and Pre-AP kids that aren’t in the right classes, there’s students without a math.” said Williams. “It’s kind of a balance between fixing schedules of students already here and getting new people enrolled.”