Each year, after choosing a set of courses, some students do not receive their requested classes due to conflicts with the master schedule.

At registration, held a week before the start of the school year, these students discovered the changes. Many approached their counselors as well as Assistant Principals Jason Meskis and Bryan Martin to find a solution.

“There were definitely more kids coming to me at registration this year,” Martin said. “Some decided they didn’t like the alternative [class] they signed up for, others suddenly wanted to drop a class … they were there for a variety of reasons.”

Scheduling began during the spring advisement process last year, when students were required to input their course requests into Naviance. Students then met with their respective counselors to review their requested classes. The prerequisites that students had to fulfill, as well as class sizes, were two factors taken into consideration.

After compiling lists of the students that wanted to take each class, Martin then dedicated the next few months to developing a “conflict matrix.” The matrix assesses the number of periods that can be run for each class based on class size and teacher availability.

The matrix is then collapsed into the master schedule once the number of conflicts reaches a minimum.

“If we were a huge school that offered all of our classes every period of the day, then it would be easy to build this master schedule,” counselor Randy McClelland said. “But in many cases, we can only offer one or two sections, especially for electives such as creative writing and speech.”

The master schedule is arranged to benefit the majority of students — which leaves behind a minority of students whose schedules do not align with what they requested.

“Approximately 80 percent of the students get exactly what they asked for, but it’s that remaining 20 percent that becomes problematic,” McClelland said. “In most cases, it has to do with conflicts. Someone asked for an elective, but it conflicted with another one of their classes.”

Among this 20 percent was senior Jacob Tennant.

“Of the six APs that I asked for, I was only in four of them,” Tennant said. “I was also completely taken out of the zero period class that I signed up for.”

Tennant originally requested AP Physics II, but was not placed into the class due to conflicts with his government class — a required course.

Instead of physics, he was placed into Film as Literature I, an elective that provides English credits.

“I basically had three options: not take physics, somehow not take government or drop AP Chinese,” Tennant said.

He eventually chose the third option, but was unsatisfied with his schedule.

“I’ve been taking Chinese for four years now, so dropping it when I was just about ready to take the AP exam was really frustrating,” Tennant said.

As a senior, Tennant’s schedule was relatively more difficult to organize.

“Seniors are always tough to schedule, because there are a lot of [single courses] made available only to them,” Martin said. “There’s not a lot of overlap in that grade.”

Tennant still received full schedules at registration, with replacements for the classes he was unable to take.

“If [the requested class] is a graduation requirement, then I’ll try to put [students] in a similar course that gives the same credits,” Martin said.

However, this may not work for every student. The replacement class that Tennant was given did not provide the same credits that he had requested; his AP Physics II class provides science credits, while Film as Literature I would instead provide English credits.

By dropping his AP Chinese class, though, Tennant ultimately received the AP Physics II class he was looking for.

McLelland said that he believes the scheduling process was overall successful.

“This was the smoothest, lowest number of conflicts we’ve ever had in the history of Oak Park High School,” McClelland said. “I’ve been here for twenty years, and I remember staying at school until 10 [p.m.] fixing schedules in the early 2000s.”

Martin said he believes that the scheduling process “was about the same as it was every year.”

“If anything went differently this time around, it was that students were given their teachers in advance,” Martin said. “We tried something new this year.”

This change may have resulted in the longer line at registration, according to Martin. He said he believes that students would change courses in an attempt to indirectly change teacher assignments.

“I know kids won’t come and say this to me, but I think some people were trying to finagle teacher changes, to be honest,” Martin said.

McClelland said he believes that the amount of scheduling conflicts was overestimated by students.

“When it’s your schedule that doesn’t work out, you just feel like we screwed up your schedule,” McClelland said. “And so you tell your friends, and they tell their friends, and they tweet all about it, and so it builds this perception that everybody’s schedule got screwed up, when in fact 80 percent of the students got what they asked for.”

Overall, scheduling was an arduous process for both the student body and administration.

“There’s a lot that goes into it,” Martin said. “There are some mistakes here and there — I definitely don’t deny that — but there’s still an intense amount of work put in behind the scenes.”