Wow! What a crazy, busy time it has been the last week! After enrollment we worked very hard to get students' schedules in the computer so they'd be ready for open house on Monday, Aug. 19th. There were so many issues with the computer program: students who didn't show up in our system, schedules that printed out wrong, students with blank schedules, students who had left had a schedule, middle school students showing up in the high school site and vice versa, students with empty hours in their schedule who needed to go to a specific class but, while trying to enter them in that specific class they were already listed on the roster! We worked and worked after open house to correct the problems. It was 12:30 a.m. before I went to bed last night (this morning). Today was the first day of classes for students. I got to school at about 7:25 and the first thing I did was print new schedules out for everyone. We told students if they had class changes they needed to make to put their name on a list and we'd get to them starting tomorrow (Thursday) with seniors and working our way down to seventh grade. There are three complete pages of student class changes! Of course, just because they put a request on the list doesn't mean they're automatically going to get it. However, we will do our best. Then as the day went along one of the English teachers came by and informed us she had seven students in one class and 28 in another (the same English course). There were probably about three classes like this. The problem is that there are no other classes for students to go to when they are behind on required courses and those take priority, so there are larger classes, bummer. We did manage to correct a middle school class problem because a previous teacher happened to come to school today. We were needing to look at last year's seventh grade test scores to determine who could go in to eighth grade honors mathematics. Our state had major issues with testing last year and we still don't have final scores! High school and middle school classes sometimes depend on these test results (remediation classes), graduating students sometimes depend on these results if they have failed tests, so it has been a mess. Since that teacher happened to visit someone was able to get information pertaining to those students from her because she taught them. Based on what she told us, we switched the students. Another two classes share seventh grade for a semester only. At semester's end, they switch teachers. I was brought a list of students wanting to take one of the specific semester classes first and the other in the spring. This helped a great deal. Without that list it would just be a guessing game. Another teacher who teaches business classes is willing to take come kids and change her class so that it is a dual class (course I and II at the same time). That way she can include more students in her class, reducing the large number of students in the English class. My days are going to be like this for a while. Tomorrow I will be looking at class numbers and switching students. After that I will start calling in students one at a time to make schedule changes. I'm not sure when I'll get to the elementary. I still plan on doing my welcome back bulletin board (a little late). Hopefully by the end of the week.