HS revises Daily Schedule as of 1/11/21

December 9, 2020

Beginning the week of January 11 the high school will adopt a new schedule. This change was proposed by students and has been given a tremendous amount of consideration by faculty and staff. We understand that this change will cause some families, especially those families with students at both the middle and high school campuses, to need to adjust their schedules, but we firmly believe that the change is in the best interests of student learning and wellbeing.

Please note: 
This change applies to high school students only.
The Middle School schedule is staying the same.

The change is as follows:

High School Students in the…
Green Cohort
Phoenix Cohort
will come to TSA
will come to TSA
Mondays and Thursdays
Tuesdays and Fridays

The most important reasons for this change are:

  1. It reduces the number of days in a row that students are remote. We have learned that students feel really disconnected from school when they’ve spent 5 days in a row off campus.
  2. It allows both cohorts to have one day of classes at the beginning of the week. We have learned from our own experience and speaking with students in the Phoenix Cohort that it is psychologically difficult to not go to in-person school at all until Thursday.
  3. It allows each cohort to have at least two days at home between their in-person days to complete school work. The hope here is that it will be easier for students to “chunk out” their assignments.
Here is the revised schedule:
Thus, all students have two days to complete the assignments for A, B, and C block classes at the start of the week. Then, when they go to their D, E, and F block classes at the end of the week they have three days including Saturday and Sunday to complete the assignments for those classes. This ability to break up the work helps students feel less overwhelmed by all of their different assignments.

 

Another important thing for families to know is that one of the reasons we chose our current schedule (Green on Mondays and Tuesdays, Phoenix on Thursdays and Fridays) was because the State was strongly recommending a deep clean of the school between the cohorts. The State of VT is no longer recommending this precaution, which has allowed us to consider the new schedule.Here are some things that are not changing:

  • Electives will still be on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and seminars on Mondays and Fridays.
  • Bus transportation will not change.
  • The start and end times of the school day, as well as the timing of each block will not change.
  • Who is in each cohort will not change. If you would like to speak with our Student Support Team about changing your student’s cohort, please use this email address: sst@sharonacademy.net.

We are aware that any change presents challenges, and that every single family in our community is affected by the constant and exhausting uncertainty caused by COVID-19. This change is a result of careful reflection and evaluation among faculty, staff, and students on our hybrid model and how to better support student learning.

Again, this change will go into effect on January 11. Here is how the week will look when TSA returns to the hybrid model that week and going forward:

Monday
January 11
HS Green
MS Green
Tuesday
January 12
HS Phoenix
MS Green
Wednesday
January 13
All Students Remote
Thursday
January 14
HS Green
MS Phoenix
Friday
January 15
HS Phoenix
MS Phoenix

Please direct questions and concerns to Head of School Mary Newman, at mnewman@sharonacademy.net.

Thank you all, parents and guardians, for everything you are doing every, single day to make it through this extremely difficult year. We will get through this, together.

 

*Why the Middle School is not changing its schedule.

There are several families that have students in both the Middle and High School. Those families are encouraged to read the following to understand why we are proceeding with the schedule change at the high school despite the inconvenience it will create for these families.

While we work hard as an institution to align as much as possible our schedules and plans between the middle school and high school, we hold most highly the value that student learning and effective instruction need to be at the center of every decision. In thinking through this question, the middle school staff understands why the high school would want to make this shift with high school level learners and also believes that middle school learners would benefit from continuing their current schedule.

Our biggest reasons for keeping the Middle School schedule the same are:

  1. Executive functioning support: Middle School students need more executive functioning support, such as help keeping track of all of their materials (power cords, books, etc). The middle school staff works hard at the end of the second day of our contact with students to make sure they are set up to go home and work remotely on their tasks. This includes making sure they don’t leave things in their lockers, classrooms, etc. but to a greater extent, it relates to how we set up our classes.
  2. Different class schedule: At the middle school, all classes except Study-All and Spanish happen both days that students are in-person. We have designed the curriculum around these two class meetings being back-to-back. Splitting the two days up undermines this design.
  3. Transitions: We know that younger students have a harder time adjusting through transitions. The middle school staff feels strongly that bouncing back and forth between in-person vs remote days would be much harder for our younger students than for high school students.