On Tuesday, Nov.15, principal Dr. Greg Tiemann announced to the school that Millard West will be moving on from a 4×4 Block schedule to an ABC schedule.

Millard West has been in a 4×4 block schedule for 28 years. While in Advisement sessions, students were informed on this new schedule change. During that 30 minute class all students learned that this new schedule will be very similar in many ways to the current schedule that we are in at the moment, and will be facing multiple changes that this new ABC schedule brings to the table. This schedule was brought up in a site planning session back in 2018 where school officials were talking about ways to improve multiple different areas involving school scheduling. 

“The current schedule that we are in appeared to me that it was standing in the way of a lot of students being able to explore a lot of programs and it also made transfer students have to change a lot of their schedules due to our schedule being a bit outdated,” Tiemann said. “ The purpose of having this schedule is to meet our critical issues, but also be something where our students can learn and grow under the schedule. This schedule benefits students because it allows the students to learn and achieve multiple different types of programs and expand their knowledge.”

Electives will be around 18 weeks instead of nine and your core classes such as math, history, English, etc will be all year because you are having all of your classes every other day. This schedule may help teachers by being able to make their lessons better for their students because if there was a mistake in the lesson one day they could fix it and make the lesson better for the students the next day. 

“I was still in my first year of teaching when I found out about the schedule change,” Debate and English teacher John Spady said. “I haven’t had much time with our current schedule, so I didn’t think much of it. I student taught with an A/B schedule at Bellevue West. Teachers will have twice as many students (and thus grades to enter), but each lesson can be used.”

This schedule change was put into play to give the students the best opportunity to succeed in high school and help them improve their future. There are mixed emotions with the students to where they may not like because they enjoy the schedule that they are in now. Some students may like this because they will be given an extra day to get assignments done. By having that extra day may be able to help them improve their grade as a student.

“My initial thoughts on the new schedule change starting next year are most negative,” sophomore Collin Witte said. “Although it will provide more opportunities for some minor groups of students such as AP capstone, academies and students in AP classes, I believe that the negatives definitely outweigh the benefits when it comes to the education of your average student. The new schedule will affect the students here at west in various ways. Instead of finishing all of your classes within the course of one semester, they will be expanded throughout the whole year, cutting down opportunities to double up classes and this whole process just slows the students down entirely.”

This schedule change will be implement when students and staff return for the 23-24 school year.