As the spring semester rolls in, the line outside Counselor Martina Torres’ office seems never-ending over a recent change to class schedules.

This change has provided administrators with a way to check on the requirements needed to graduate and make sure all students are eligible to walk the stage on graduation day. This schedule  ‘change’ has taken the form of Edgenuity online labs, where students are able to take recovery classes to ensure that any failed courses are retaken and passed. With these changes, classes have been rearranged in attempts to balance out class sizes.

These classes took effect on the first day of the spring semester but the idea was spurred nearly a month before. Principal Pia Damonte notified parents of any students that had failing classes on Dec.13 about these recovery classes. The following Saturday, she gathered them to enroll in these classes. This gave students the opportunity to recover credits from the particular course that they had previously failed and gave the students an advantage to not be labeled as a repeat student.

“It’s not just so much the recovery of the classes but the recovery of the credits…this allows them to move onto the next grade level,” Torres said.

Considering that as the school year gets closer to an end, seniors repeatedly hear ‘do you meet graduation requirements?’ and the rest of the grade levels get the ‘are you on track to graduate?’ speech from teachers and administrators all the time, these labs were created for this particular reason.

Along with the changes of these online classes, due to budget, Ronald Baer’s English 10 class was handed over to Journalism/English teacher Adriana Chavira. This caused the collapse of the 4th period photography class that Chavira had. Two spanish classes were merged and some were replaced completely by Edgenuity.

“Since we have fewer offerings, it’s harder to get students back on track during the school year but we started creating these labs to get them back on track,” Damonte said.

Along with the students, Spanish teachers Martha Rodriguez and Glenda Hurtado, Science teacher James Morrison and History teacher Brenda Helfing learned how to supervise and assist students in taking these online courses. On the schedule programs, their classes read ‘Edgenuity Lab’ and no longer are formatted as a lecture-interactive classroom. The teacher no longer teaches the students directly but is now just a guide for these students.

“Logging in and doing all that is easy, it’s me not teaching…I’m having a hard time with that,” Spanish teacher Martha Rodriguez said.

This system is built to help the student but depending on how the student learns best, this may cause them more stress and struggle. Also taking into account is that the Edgenuity class is taken in any classroom, not specifically for the subject you are doing. For example, you may be recovering credits for health but take the online course with a Spanish teacher as your guide.

Sophomore Anabella Powell has been taking math courses through Edgenuity and currently is taking Geometry. She finds this as a major hurdle due to the fact that she was so accustomed to interactive classes.

“It’s confusing for me and new,” Powell said. “It’s like a grey area for me.”