Since 2010, Arena scheduling has been an opportunity for students to change their current schedule at the beginning of each semester. But, starting next year, Arena will no longer be available.
Arena allowed students to wait in line on a specific date once a semester to request scheduling changes with department coordinators and finalized with a counselor. These requests often allowed students to freely swap out any semester long class of their choice.
One of the reasons for discontinuing arena stems from the ability for students to change their schedule without the input from their parents or teachers, which is required in the initial pre-registration process the previous year.
“So much time and effort is put into pre-registration, where we have you guys talk to your teacher, get the parent signatures, [and] spend that three week process, really kind of having that interaction,” Councilor Coordinator Christine Snow said. “Arena kind of defeats that whole process. A kid goes to the arena, can drop and add a class, and all of those people that [were] involved in pre-reg are now not involved.”
Registrar Marcus McDavid understands the reasoning behind Arena, but also agrees that it has interfered with the purpose of preregistration.
“I think part of the idea was acknowledging, ‘We’re a big school. We have a lot of choices. Maybe we need to give kids one final chance to get their schedule perfect.’ I can appreciate that,” McDavid said. “But the feedback I kept getting from department coordinators was that it was kind of counterintuitive to all the work we did with pre-registration.”
And, over time, concerns and frustrations have risen amongst department coordinators, regarding arena.
“This has been a topic of conversation all four school years that I’ve been in this office about the effectiveness of arena schedule changes, the inefficiencies of arena schedule changes, and the frustration of arena schedule changes because of the volume of changes that happen at the last minute,” McDavid said.
And the impact isn’t simply staff-oriented, students have shown their frustration and Principal Ryan Silva understood the system was creating more problems than it was solving.
“Students were giving feedback [saying] ‘I stood in line for hours and nothing happened,’” Silva said. “It was misleading people to think you just had the ability to make all these changes, when the reality is there’s very few opportunities to make changes because there’s not a ton of space in classes.”
Teachers and staff have also struggled to deal with these last minute changes and McDavid has seen the administrative burden.
“I had a department coordinator that came to me and said, ‘Hey, I have a full stack of paper changes out of my department alone,’ [and] I’m sitting there seeing a stack that’s three inches high, full of paper,” McDavid said. “We’ve worked really hard, and to have this many changes after we think we got it right, I think ‘how do we improve?’”
While Arena is ending, schedule changes will still be possible for “repairs” rather than preference-based swaps. Repairs include graduation requirement issues, duplicate classes, failed courses that require doubling up, or academic placement errors.
“If a student accidentally signs up for a class they’ve already taken, that’s a repair and we’ll fix it,” Snow said. “But switching from a drawing class to team sports just because you changed your mind, that wouldn’t be considered a repair.”
As students begin selecting courses for the upcoming school year, administrators say the removal of Arena marks a shift toward greater accountability and long-term planning. Rather than relying on last-minute changes, the new system is designed to ensure schedules are built thoughtfully from the start and remain largely in place once the year begins.
“That’s why we’re pushing so hard right now to make sure you’re really thoughtful,” Silva said. “If you sign up for a class, you need to understand that you’re going to be stuck in it.”
