March 19, 2024

Conflicts are inevitable with new master schedule system

Staff Editorial

This school year, Manhattan Beach Unified School District made the decision to transition from the use of Powerschool to Aeries. Although the transition to any new program often presents complications, a majority of Costa’s student population was able to enroll in the courses that they selected in April of last school year. Therefore, although some students had to make sacrifices to take their desired courses, overall, Costa’s master schedule was created to serve students’ needs.

Since 2013, Costa has used Powerschool to create the master schedule. However, MBUSD transitioned to Aeries to solve complications that Powerschool continuously presented, Costa principal Dr. Ben Dale said.

According to a La Vista survey of 200 students, 87% of students reported that they or someone they know had a problem with their schedule. Thus, it is apparent that the master schedule did not accommodate every student’s needs. This was detrimental to many students as they likely had to spend time in the counselors office in the beginning of the year as opposed to classrooms.

According to the Aeries services, the system was used to create the master schedule. It was inevitable, therefore, that problems would arise; the first interaction with any new program undoubtedly has flaws. Students should have realized that schedule conflicts were unavoidable in many cases, however, they had a right to be frustrated with schedule problems they encountered.

Students had a right to be frustrated with problems they encountered with their schedule. However, the amount of students who came into the counseling offices to change their schedules did not dramatically increase from the amount of students who have shown up in years past, guidance counselor Eliza Santarosa said. It is evident that although students may have felt that there were a multitude of problems within their schedules, in the grand scheme of things, there were not substantially more difficulties than in prior years, Santarosa said.

It seems that students may have exaggerated their problems so that they could blame the district for all of their schedule  complications, because while the 87% of students in our survey reporting they or someone they knew had challenges, which may be the result of “someone they knew” skewing the results.

Some students will undoubtedly have problems with their schedules when a new system is used to create the master schedule. However, a majority of students were fortunately able to enroll in the courses that they selected to take in April of last school year, which reveals that the transition to Aeries was not detrimental to the master schedule.

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