001all right good evening everybody and welcome to the ninth grade family course registration night my name is tom sadiq i'm the principal of the high school i'm here with some fabulous people who will all introduce themselves now hi i'm nicki grimacki assistant principal hi there welcome my name is sam camera i am also an assistant principal and i am ella stocker i am the librarian at the high school these are some folks who will all be getting to know the next four years right now we're going to talk to you about the registration process so we can get your students all ready to enter the high school so we're going to have a slideshow and go through all the slides and at the end we'll be able to answer any questions that you may have
002thanks for joining us this evening taking time out of your busy schedule okay i'm gonna just get the slideshow up here and then i'll take us off the screen so everyone can read this properly so again good evening so tonight we are going to talk about everything you need to know relative to your children registering for courses in ninth grade so the purpose of this evening is to discuss with you the four by four block schedule and answer questions that you may have about that how to access the videos that were made by the department heads explaining the ninth grade classes we're going to talk about elective opportunities at amherst high school as well as the registration timeline so the 4x4 block for for some of you you already have children at the high school
003so that you're pretty familiar with this uh for others this is brand new and so for us as a school we're actually in our second year of this block uh well first years as the 4x4 when we um last year we did a modified block um but what we have decided is you know the importance of students having fewer classes at one time so the way this will work is your children will select two semesters worth of classes so so we call it four by four because there's eight blocks to fill and i think this will become clearer as we go through the presentation so within the school day we do run those four blocks we start our school day at nine o'clock uh our second block b block begins at 10 25 and then
004embedded in the c block is a 30-minute lunch so based on the course that students have we do this by departments different departments eat different lunches and we have we operate um on day schedule quarters and so every quarter we rotate that so that students uh have you know the opportunity for different lunches some you know throughout the year they will probably have different lunches then we end the day with our d or then our fourth block is our d block and then we end the day by rotating each day of the week students go back to one of their four classes um and that is what we consider our plus block and i can discuss that in more in more detail as we go so a sample ninth grade schedule uh for semester one
005a student might have english science math and then for 45 days the student would have their required health class and then they would uh get an elective that would offset that 45-day elective and then the same type of configuration for semester two because we have eight blocks um most students will have five core academics so that's the math social studies science english and world language and then that leaves the opportunity for multiple electives so um one of the benefits of this 4x4 block is that students get to take many electives and try different courses in engineering the arts computer science and so far the feedback on that has been has been excellent and so a lot of questions come up about the 4x4 schedule and um and again because many people in our you know
006this is only our second year um you know several about the schedule so one will be how are the electives offered and i just spoke to that most electives are going to be 45 days 60 hour courses and it allows for students to really sample and try lots of different courses for many many years prior to the block amherst high school used to have directed studies embedded in the schedule we no longer have those so students will be in classes for the four blocks however as i mentioned earlier we have this class at the end of the day called the plus block and what we found is that sometimes students who are absent and they need to um make up work or students who need extra help with their teachers they're actually going to go
007bl go back to the plus block for the courses that they already have so instead of having a study hall with a teacher who might not be their own instead they have this mini 40 minute period at the end of the day which is like a study hall and yet it will be with their actual teachers other questions that have come up for students with ieps the way we do academic skills for most ninth graders is we actually offer it as a block during the day it's so far been successful in helping students transition to the high school it's time in the day for them to receive their related services and it's also time for them to connect with a special education teacher who in many cases will be their liaison and to get extra
008help and support with their high school classes so most courses in the high school run uh 90 days one semester however it should be noted that there are some classes that are year long so they are double blocked some of those include algebra 1 topics in mathematics and ap bc calculus there are some courses that run three quarters of the year such as our a b calculus course and our ap statistics so that's the whole first semester and then it's another quarter in the second semester leaving anot uh yet another quarter for an elective for families and students that might be concerned about continuity it's certainly an option for students to request to double up in uh in different areas such as math and world language so students will be permitted to request those additional
009blocks and um based on our you know our enrollments we'll do our best to accommodate those requests so here's an example i had mentioned that for example algebra one is such a foundational course in mathematics that students coming into ninth grade who are scheduled for algebra one that's a double block so we wanted families to see what that would look like so they would still have they would have the math all year then they would have their other core academics and it still leaves time for multiple elective opportunities for students on ieps who have academic skills here's another example where the academic skills as two semester courses or year long still allows for ample elective choices so we thought that even though your your children are coming into ninth grade it's still worth noting some
010of the opportunities that we offer here at amherst high school that we're really proud of and really helps to engage the students and give them a well-rounded experience we have many students who choose an alternative learning program as part of their their program sometimes in ninth more frequently in 11th and 12th grade but students are permitted to do community service for high school credit some students especially older students choose to be teaching assistants and they contract with the teacher to do that and many students who have interests that they want to explore more deeply can receive credit for independent studies additionally every student in the high school is placed into an advisory those advisories meet once a week on wednesdays and there's many different activities that are led by students as well as faculty during
011advisory time in addition it's a great reminder that we have 45 sports teams we have 40 clubs and then we have our ensembles and you know in our performing arts and music department so there's many opportunities for students to be involved in the high school outside of just their eight blocks so the registration timeline as you'll see those events uh in march have already occurred and here we are on the third bullet march 30th is our course registration night and then on april 8th all right so after tonight hopefully you feel more comfortable helping your children choose courses april 8th course registration closes and then from april 8th and april 11th the counselors will help with students who weren't able to meet that deadline or really have issues or concerns that need to be addressed
012before they feel comfortable submitting their registration and then we have a verification period so between april 25th and april 29th you will receive a list of which courses your children have elected for ninth grade and it's a chance to make sure that there aren't errors or mistakes or if we have new information from when they originally requested courses you have an opportunity to change it and then on april 28th students are going to get an opportunity to come to the high school and visit the high school in what we call step up day here at amherst and it's a really nice chance for 8th graders to experience a morning at the high school engaging with high school students so yes we are excited to welcome the class of 2026 to the high school and at
013this time principal sadiq and i will answer any questions that you might have with the idea that um now you know after our presentation is really a nice opportunity to go in and look at the departmental videos which ms stocker has posted here on the stream yard so there's the link for you to independently explore the the videos that each department made all right thanks mr mackey for that now we're just gonna wait to see if we have any questions from our families just put them in the chat and then we'll do our best to answer any questions and if you have some a question here we go who do we go to with questions i think it will really depend on what your question is a lot of questions can be answered by our
014guidance counselors of course tonight if you have any specific questions we have to do our best to answer them i think it really depends on what your question is yeah and in many cases our middle school counselors also you know our middle school staff have a lot of experience with this so in many cases the middle school can also answer your questions and i was just going to add that in the slideshow with the videos from department heads that mr mackey just mentioned there is also a link to a google form that you can fill out with questions and that google form goes directly to those department heads and they'll be able to answer those questions directly and their email addresses are also right on those slides there's also a way to get in touch
015with them directly thanks okay how do we go about language placement so if your child is taking a language at the middle school and they do well in it then they will go to the next level at the high school there's also chances to do placement tests mostly the placement tests are done for students who are transferring into our district from another middle school or from another high school okay how often are languages run for the full year you know concerned about loss of language skills not practice for year and a half for half year so there are is an opportunity for some doubling up like there could possibly be a chance to take level one in the fall and level two of a language in the spring it really depends on enrollment in the
016other class choices that your child is trying to get we are trying to also come up with other ways to provide supplemental supplemental material for students to access in the in the in between time of languages and math courses as well those are the two biggest questions we get about the potential gap of time in between so i'm definitely working hard to figure um out more ways and more opportunities for students to stay current or up to date with their language or math class okay we're curious to hear about the honors curriculum how do we decide if our child should be in honors how many honors classes should a child take realistically so some of the recommendations for honors classes at the high school be made by their current teachers at the middle school and
017then in some of our classes like the english class for example and many of our language classes you have the option once the class starts to decide if you want to do the extra honors work or stay with the college prep work um i'll oh go ahead go ahead okay um i'll also add that that's actually one of the benefits so we know that there's you know pluses and minuses to this block schedule one of the benefits though is that in the past students had seven courses at a time so if students wanted to take honors level in multiple curricular areas they they were balancing seven different classes in this schedule most students will have three core academics in one semester and two in the other so i actually think this schedule provides more opportunity
018for students to take more honors classes if they're taking let's say three of their five classes as honors and they all end up in the same semester those are things that we can try to balance in the summer i'm one of the 12-month employees so i'm here all summer working on schedules and so we do go through each schedule by hand and really try to balance those if we can um so i would say that it's a little easier those of you who have had children that had the seven blocks at one time i actually think the feedback's been that students feel because they don't have the classes all at the same time that it's easier to take more of the honors classes if that's what they choose to do replacement test for heritage speakers
019uh yes i believe there are placement tests that would determine what level would be the most appropriate one so you know we do i'm fortunate to have a lot of folks who their first language isn't english so we try to offer you know challenging courses for everybody so there would be an option in the summer to take the placement test before we finalize the schedule [Music] falling behind and doing more poorly in their math and language classes under this policy so again this is to be kind of we get the first couple of years that we've done the block schedules there's not a whole lot of data i know with the plus block and the work that students teachers are trying to do now to catch students up i mean it's something we'll continue to
020look into so one of the also one of the challenges coming up with the pandemic when we went from remote learning and things were so much different to now being in person honestly it's going to take us uh unlike maybe another year to really get some quality data to find out if this what kind of impact it's having we do understand that there are there is a potential for students to have a significant amount of time between math classes and language classes so that's why we're also working on again ways for students to stay up to speed with the math not to lose too much of what they've gained so yeah signing up for the classes believe the the link is in the chat and will also be provided excuse me one of the things
021we wanted to do is to make sure that you got the information tonight from us and then there will be more information sent to you with different opportunities to start to register for classes and the timeline will be sent out again and middle school counselors will also begin in touch with folks to answer questions and to help with registration uh the honors recommendations generally do go to the high school [Music] and if there is a place on the forum i mean you can request any classes that you want really and then we'll there's a verification time like there are some classes that have prerequisites and if questions like that come up once we review the schedules the guidance counselors or admin from high school get in touch with you to verify a few things and
022clarify any questions that we have but a lot of the recommendations will come from the middle school to the high school as well um i just wanted to mention too um the the way this evening is designed was for us to kind of introduce you to like how many courses each student's taking i do think if you watch the departmental videos and then there's a place where you can actually pose questions about specific courses i'm available sam camera who does the scheduling is also available you should feel really free to reach out to us directly but i think once you watch those videos it's going to answer a lot of the questions that are coming up here so doubling up in math and language in the same year again there's no guarantee but you can
023request it and again we'll try to do our best to honor those requests there's a lot of different variables with creating new master schedule every year because based on requests so it's not only going to be the request of your child but also the number of sections that will be able to offer so it's hard to say definitively right now if that can happen or not but we'll try our best to honor those requests uh that's a good question i mean now that things have loosened up and i'm hoping that the code numbers will continue to be low we will think about ways for students to families to visit like right now as mr maggie said earlier we do have a step up day planned for eighth graders but if families want to also come
024and visit we could definitely figure out a time i mean over the summer there are other programs in summer school going on in the school but it may be less challenging to figure to have students come and take a tour over the summer than during the school year while school session so let's say right now we can try to figure something out for the summer one honors and a math elective miss chromakey yeah so we have so the algebra one is year long um the middle school everything really depends on which math course um your child is taking now in the in the middle school or if you're coming from another school we do do math placement exams if your child is coming from a different school and then we work really hard to allow
025students who are trying to get to calculus before senior year to double up and have multiple opportunities we care very much about not tracking students in math we want to have multiple pathways for them to reach calculus and beyond so while i can't specifically answer the algebra one and math elective um you know that's something i you know we could take offline and look at your child's individual situation and sometimes there's a little lag up there we go okay have outcomes on ap exams change since the change to the 404 block so last year we were in a different version of the 4x4 block and students took ap exam so this will be the first year that we've been in this version of the block schedule that will have ap exams so honestly we'll have
026to wait to see those results and then compare them to past years to be able to answer that but this is one of the data points we'll be looking at in terms of how much impact we think the block schedule if any has had on students learning um also in our high school some of the ap courses if they're double blocked they're actually they're gonna have more instructional time than they had in the seven drop one schedule additionally at amherst high school students can take ap courses and they are not required to take the ap test that's different in different high schools but we do not require students to take the ap test they're encouraged to they're prepared to take it but they they are not required to so we actually have a lot of
027courses where students don't actually take the test um and there's been you know there's studies you can you can go online you can google different schedules and what they find is that that the real predictor of academic success is not necessarily the schedule um the 4x4 became very popular in the late 90s and then it's really resurfacing again uh based on the you know after the pandemic or you know we're still in the pandemic but there's nothing that suggests that 4x4 block schedules have a detrimental impact on students even as they look at those gaps they actually find a lot of the benefits from students having multiple opportunities to study to have different electives in their schedule as well as doing better on the fewer courses that they have at a time all right thanks
028for that so the question is if a student takes an honors level class and figures is too hard then what does it look like so part of the answer that question is going to depend like in english class for example when honors is embedded within the college prep class there's not really a big detriment to that they can just decide that the honors work is a little too much to do and they would just on their transcript it would just be reflected as a college prep class of seven honors some other classes it may take a little more schedule change we do have an ad drop time that we try to make these sorts of change because chances are it would mean a major change to their schedule because not every block has like if
029they have b period honor honors algebra there may not be a b period college prep algebra so it may have to go to another period which means other classes would need to be changed so a lot of would depend on the class and the timing of it you're muted ella can't get through a meeting without somebody being accidentally muted um i just want to point out that somebody in the chat just mentioned that the departmental video link is not working for them so i am double checking that it should be working i did check it beforehand and it was working but um if anyone else is having some success if they would let us know in the chat that would be very helpful so one cause working for somebody else so christina if it's still
030not working for you feel free to reach out to me directly and i'll find you like a pdf version we can send you thanks all right let's see if a few more questions pop up so again if more questions come up that you think of after this is over please don't hesitate to reach out to us and as mrs gramacki mentioned the middle school is very knowledgeable of all of our procedures as well so you can start with them or you can reach out to us and we'll do our best to answer any questions that you have and ella would you mind putting um my email as well as miss camera's email in the chat so that again if tonight people didn't feel like they got the answers they could write to me or miss
031camera directly and we can respond all right so we'll hang out for a few more minutes and see if there's any more questions yeah i thank everybody for joining us i know everybody's schedules are really busy and spring sports are just starting some people's dinners or sometimes a little bit later now here we go any guidance on kids switching from french middle school to spanish as a freshman it's generally not a problem yeah it that's no problem students can start a language brand new in the middle in the high school or if they've taken a couple years of it at the middle school then they can start at a higher level at the high school it's really up to you and what you feel is best for you and your child it's definitely no problem
032to start even if they you know if they've done two years of french then wanted to start spanish brand new with spanish one instead of french two at the high school they could do that and then most state schools only require two years of a language some of the other private schools require three sometimes four years so the depending on you know if you do two years of spanish at the high school and then in 11th grade your child decides they want to try french they could do that as well i don't want to depend on kind of where they're at time yeah i don't want to ignore this question about the difference between geometry honors and algebra honors so first of all we have algebra 1 which is a year-long course and we find
033that when students come to the high school and they haven't yet had algebra because passing the math mcas is a graduation requirement we double block the algebra so that students really have a strong foundation and plenty of time to study algebra we so it's algebra one and then we have a geometry honors course and many students who completed algebra in the eighth grade will come into ninth grade and take the geometry college prep or geometry honors course so um so i'm not sure how to make the distinction because they're two different content areas obviously algebra and geometry so i would encourage you to watch miss moody's uh video miss moody's the department head for mathematics here at the high school and if you continue to have questions about the math i encourage you to reach
034out to her directly or you're welcome to email me and i will work to make sure you get a personalized response i said correctly kids take five quarters of last year it can seem to take two core classes in the fall and three in the spring so it really depends on the number of sections that we offer so now i think we signed social studies in the world language are the five core academics we're speaking of and again it will just depend on the number of sections that we offer of each of those classes and it's all based on enrollment so it's hard to say we try to have it balanced so it's three and two but it's not necessarily always three in the fall and two in the spring and we're trying to balance
035the schedules it's definitely trying to get the three and two this means again sometimes it works out during the spring during the fall or three spring and two in the fall vice versa all right let's um so there'll be information coming out about the spring musical here now we're trying to offer allow more folks to more audience members this year than we have in the past so there will be an opportunity especially if some of you i'm sure hat may have students children already at the high school maybe in the performing arts program definitely a chance to come out i think opening night is next thursday thursday friday and saturday it's always an exciting time of the year all right um i think ella can put the links back in the chat for everybody i
036know with all the questions i think they were in that one point with other questions probably near the beginning of the stream they're actually in the description box right below this video rebecca so if you just want to take a look right below where the video is you should see a link to both the slideshow with the videos in it and then also a link to course registration directly um there was another question um oh until after apparent teacher conferences uh no i would say pl you know especially because a lot of the choices are going to be the electives it's a nice opportunity for students to select those um the reality is is if if you're if you make course selections and then something drastically changes up until the summer we can make a
037course change right so well we don't want to do that for you know everyone because it would certainly throw off our master schedule um if something compelling comes up in a conference and you need to make a change we absolutely can change that and then there's also the course verification process that allows you to see what students have put in and also for things like english those choices are made once school begins because students are in the same classroom and so that's not a decision that has to be made right now students can make that choice in the fall all right i hope everyone's gotten all their questions answered at least for now and please reach out with other questions i'm not sure how long this was scheduled for but i can hang out for
038a few more minutes let's see if the questions come to mind all right well i think that that oh here we go thank you i'm glad it was helpful thank you for joining us again i know it's seems like doing these evening things it's convenient for some but at the end of a long day sometimes you know it can be hard to even make this happen i'm glad that everyone who's here with us was able to join us hopefully it was informative and this is the beginning we'll be getting to know each other a lot better over the next four years and we'll be sending out more information about upcoming opportunities or ways that you can learn more about the high school and look forward to welcoming your students to us in the fall oh
039here we go all right actually many people are leaving which is fine but there is a question about the um sample schedule so maybe you tuned in late but that is on um ella will will our powerpoint be available so that they can go back and look at the example schedules and again i'm glad someone made that note on our example schedule we put three in the fall and two in the spring it could very easily be the opposite yeah and i'll just note that um i can add that powerpoint i'll add it to the description box it's not in there now but right after we get off this call i'll be able to add that in there um and we can also add a link to it within that slideshow so it'll be in
040two different places but folks to go back and look at that powerpoint again thanks so uh so time for socializing and recess we don't have an official recess at the school we've we've thought about trying to figure out a way to fit recess in think it's important for students to move a lot of socializing does happen during the lunch blocks and students do get a chance to connect during the passing period it's five minutes in between class we encourage students to walk and talk so they're not going to be late to their next classes but the socializing most of it does happen during the lunch time and also during the plus block at the end of the day if students because it does rotate they don't necessarily get to see students who don't have class
041with like on mondays right now a period is the plus block at the end of the day tuesdays b period wednesdays is advisory thursday is a c and on friday is d period and though during those times they can get a head start in their work or they can socialize a little bit with students but yeah that it mainly happens during lunch i'm going to be getting in that into school as well right i can't see how many people are still with us there are any last questions like to try to take them now if not i'll get on with the civil knights all right well again thank you everybody for joining us hopefully you got a lot of good information from tonight and again if you have any questions don't hesitate to reach out
042and take care