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May Principal Update
By John Burkholder, Your Principal
As we head toward the end of the school year, we also head to a place where we say goodbye to many friends as they move on to new chapters in their lives. And while it is at times difficult to say goodbye, our calendar provides us with the definitive distraction—summer! As principal, I recognize that for parents, the enthusiasm for summer can be diminished at times by an underlying restless tension with regard to the new routines and open ended nature of summer, and at times worry about the new school year that lies ahead. What classes will my child have and who will their teachers be? When will enrollment day get here?!? With these thoughts in mind, read on to learn about the work being done to create student schedules at Hamilton Middle as we head toward summer.
Our Hamilton student scheduling process is intensive and spans a period from mid-January until mid-September, eight months in total. Class placements begin on a Monday afternoon in mid-January when a group of us convene in front of the fireplace over at Covenant Presbyterian Church to discuss what our class offerings might look like come September given available resources and student needs. At this stage we also try to get a sense of any unique factors that need to be consider, like the end of Covid Zero in China and the potential return of visiting scholars and their families at the UW who tend to live in our attendance area. In February and March, students are invited to complete UA, Music, and World Language class selection forms, including fifth grade students at our feeder elementary schools. During this same time, as principal I receive our staffing allocation for the coming school year, which I use to create a staffing plan that will hopefully match the needs of our students beginning in September. In March and April our Special Education staff members and our ESL support staff work to identify ways in which students who receive these services might be scheduled to ensure appropriate levels of support. In May, June, and July, our schedulers go through an intensive process of scheduling students, a complex process that requires that several criteria be met for each individual student across an eight period day along with alternating A and B days.
Online enrollment opens on August 3, and an in-person day for enrollment takes place on August 18 (see below article for more info on enrollment). This period of time in August results in many new students enrolling along with some of our current students enrolling at different schools. During this time our schedulers are at it again, creating schedules for our new students that meet their instructional needs.
And then school starts! In September we learn of more new enrollments and on the third Friday in September, the district makes teacher allocation adjustments that can result in us needing to adjust our rosters based on an increase or decrease in teachers.
In the end, our class placement process has multiple steps that result in each student being provided with the best possible schedule. There is no incentive for us to ever have a “bad schedule” for any given student. If you have continued questions about our student scheduling process, please feel free to stop by our Hamilton Middle office. Here’s to a tension-free summer!
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