By Cayla Nguyen, Designer-In-Chief & Cecilia Nguyen, News Editor
Next school year, Fountain Valley High School (FVHS) will implement a new bell schedule that has nine-minute passing periods and will not include a break. Class periods will still remain 55 minutes, and a five-minute announcement period will be added to the beginning of 3rd period on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
The bell schedule this year included an 11-minute break where students could walk around campus to buy snacks or get help from teachers; however, these minutes did not count towards the school’s instructional minutes, prompting the staff to propose a different bell schedule.
“The total number of minute requirements and the total number of minutes we were supposed to bank, meaning have above and beyond requirement, were all increased, so what we found was, if you kept with the current schedule with break, you would not have enough instructional minutes,” said Principal Dr. Morgan Smith.
A Bell Schedule Committee met throughout the year to evaluate different schedules and made a pool of the best schedule options for the staff to vote on. The two final bell schedule choices consisted the previous year’s bell schedule with a 16-minute Baron Academic Time (BAT) replacing the break and the selected schedule with nine minute passing periods.
“With the bulk of our teachers voting for [the new schedule], I think they had their own take on why [a nine minute passing period] was better than [other schedules]. But, one of the biggest things [on why this schedule was chosen] was having enough time to do things. And they felt that, rather than [having] one specific period in the day like BAT, having plenty of time in between each of the periods throughout the day to do similar activities freed it up more for students,” said Smith.
The new schedule allows the school to accumulate more bank time, giving the school more flexibility to decide how many assembly days we have.
“One of the dynamics that’ll come with the [new schedule] is how we use our assemblies. Using assembly schedules, we’re able to accomplish things, like more time focused for guidevisement. With a lot of minutes being banked [in the new schedule], we can do some pretty dynamic things with some of our special schedules,” said Smith.
Teachers and staff have varied opinions over the new bell schedule, but teachers have the ability to revise the schedule if the new schedule does not work for the students and staff.
“There’s a huge variance of opinion: some teachers are for [the new schedule], some teachers are frustrated by it. So, the discussion will continue… and if it’s not working [next year], teachers will revisit this and come up with something completely different,” said Smith.
