Sophomore Daniella Miranda sat frustrated in the Geometry class she had been mistakenly placed in as she awaited her turn to be summoned to the counseling office to fix her schedule.
School had been in session for two weeks this fall and Miranda was one of the many students who had yet to get the various mistakes in their schedules corrected.
“I had lots of difficulty getting my schedule fixed and there were a lot of people in the same boat,” Miranda said. “It seemed like the counselors were very overwhelmed for the whole first month of school.”
The counselors were indeed overwhelmed struggling to get through the hundreds of schedule change request forms students had filled out.
Residential and Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) magnet counselor Ms. Anna Keshishyan explained that due to a decline in enrollment, the school’s counseling staff had been cut in half, leading to a greater workload for the remaining counselors.
“Less counselors means our caseload is higher. Right now I have over 480 students that I am responsible for,” Ms. Keshishyan said.
Both Ms. Keshishyan and Counselor Ms. Joanne Leigh were notified that they would be taking over counseling the magnet programs, as well as their previous residential students, shortly before the school year began in August 2025.
Taking on the magnet programs created new problems for the counselors when it came to changing schedules.
“The problem that kept occurring was that the students kept saying they didn’t get the classes that they picked with their previous counselor,” Ms. Keshishyan said.
Keshishyan had a system in place to combat scheduling problems with her residential students, but was thrown for a loop with the new magnet students.
“With my residential students last year I told them to give me five electives, so in case something wasn’t available I could give them something else that they might want and not just give them random classes,” Ms. Keshishyan said. “With the magnet students this year, a lot of them came in telling me they were in the wrong electives and everything felt very disorganized.”
This disorganization and the large number of students assigned to each counselor meant fixing each student’s schedule took weeks.
Many students were still switching in and out of classes up until the five-week grading period, causing students like Miranda to miss important instruction in their correct classes.
“The time it took to fix my schedule made me lose out on instructional time, especially in Algebra 2,” Miranda said. “It was hard to catch up because the course goes at a quick pace and everyone was already ahead of me, so I was kinda on my own.”
Students were not the only ones inconvenienced by the delays.
“It’s frustrating for teachers as well, especially if the kid came into the class right before the five-week, because we didn’t know what to do with this,” Biology and Forensic Science teacher Ms. Donna Hung said. “We are trying to teach everything from the first five weeks quickly to them, give them an overview of what we have been doing and the kids are just kinda lost. They are not as quick to adapt because they’ve gone so long without instruction.”
AP Environmental Science teacher Ms. Tracey Kim also experienced constant turnover in her classes that affected her teaching.
“I had to slow down the pace of the course a bit just to try and get everyone on the same page and this combined with being on the block schedule has left a lot of AP classes behind schedule,” Ms. Kim said.
Despite these adjustments, many students who joined the class late still ended up falling behind.
“I tried to modify the work and not have them do everything we did since the beginning but still for AP classes they need to go over that material,” Ms. Kim explained. “In my AP classes many end up switching out again because it was just too much to catch up on.”
Ms. Keshishyan acknowledged the frustration from all sides.
“I understand students’ frustration but I want them to try and understand I am doing all that I can do and you either like it or you don’t,” Ms. Keshishyan said. “I really do like my job. I am here to help students and that is what I try my best to do.”
At this point of the semester students have been organized into their correct classes but students like Miranda are worried the time they missed might have lasting impacts.
“I am just hoping the concepts that I missed are not going to impede me from understanding future lessons,” Miranda said.
This article originally appeared in the Fall 2025 print edition.
