As the second semester of the 2024-2025 school year has begun, students’ classes and schedules have been changed due to teachers taking sabbatical leaves and adjusting class sizes. 

It’s common for students’ schedules to change at this time of the year. This semester in particular, some teachers took a leave of absence. This left schedules needing to be switched around.

“I’m honestly really upset because I really liked all of my old teachers,” junior Sophia Valencia, who had three classes changed after dropping one, said. “If they had notified me that these changes were going to happen, I could have been better prepared.”

College and career counselor Jeanette Lok said that the instructional vice principal and head counselors are the ones in charge of changing schedules, not the individual counselors.

“They are looking specifically at a report that looks at class sizes across the different classes,” Lok said. “They look at the breakdown of the numbers of students, and so they’re looking at everything in order to make sure that classes are balanced.”

After students are made aware their classes and schedules have been changed, individual counselors like Lok are available to offer support by helping students become more familiar with their new schedules and adjusting to the changes.

“I think in any situation, change is hard, whether that’s meeting a new teacher or having new classmates, but I think in some ways, adapting to change is also a good thing,” Lok said. “Balancing classes are meant to keep classes smaller so that students have a better experience learning, and then teachers also have a better experience teaching.”

Lok expressed that change is very common every semester, and even though this semester there were more than normal students have resources that can help them. 

“I think [students] getting used to teachers and liking classes is always a challenge,” Lok said. “[A good place to start is] visiting the teacher during tutorial, [or] reaching out to the teacher if [you] have concerns.”