District announces revised finals schedule to fulfill senior hour requirements
Blue Valley school district announced an updated schedule for the week of seniors finals to fulfill the required hours for graduation.
March 20, 2018
Blue Valley School District announced a revised senior finals schedule for the week of May 7-11. The new schedule comes in response to three inclement weather days during this school year.
Principal Amy Murphy said high schools in the district will eliminate the staggered schedule method which has been used in past years in favor of a block schedule for senior finals.
“We think that’s the easiest way to pick up enough minutes, because [seniors are] not short by much,” Murphy said. “So, instead of what we’ve done in the past … where we backed [seniors] out of finals, we’re actually going to run a regular block week that week.”
All students will follow a traditional bell schedule on Monday, May 8 and Tuesday, May 9. On Wednesday, May 9 the high school will follow an odd block schedule with seniors taking finals for hours 1, 3, 5 and 7. Thursday, May 10 will be a traditional late arrival even block day with the senior class taking finals for hours 2, 4 and 6.
The district is implementing a new schedule for the week of finals.
In the event of a senior believing their schedule is unusually heavy on Wednesday’s block schedule, Murphy said the administration will look at them on a “case-by-case basis.”
“Let’s say you’re taking four AP classes, and all four AP classes end up on Wednesday, then we would look at a case-by-case basis of trying to possibly rearrange some of those for you so that you don’t end up with your four heaviest finals on the same day,” Murphy said.
In order to graduate students must meet a certain amount of hours each year. Due to Kansas Statute 72-1106, underclassmen are required to have 1116 school hours, and seniors need 1086 school hours.
Despite the schedule change, Class Day will remain on May 11. Murphy said due to graduation being earlier in recent years, the danger of having to rearrange the schedule at the end of the year has increased. With this year’s schedule change, Murphy said the district will take a look into pushing graduation back in upcoming years.
“We’ve been having some conversations about graduation,” Murphy said. “If you kind of look at it over time, it’s kind of moved up. So I think there will be some looking at that.”
