By Stephanie Pham
Last month, just as students were settling into their new schedules, students in the first period AP Computer Science Principles (AP Comp Sci) hybrid class discovered the class would transition into a traditional, in-person format.
The recent California state law requiring a minimum of 240 instructional minutes for every student prompted the change and school administrators noticed some students’ schedules didn’t meet that minimum.
In describing the rationale for this decision, Rachel Kloppenburg, Fountain Valley High School (FVHS) assistant principal of guidance, said, “We went through a problem solving process. How many students does this affect and how about the students with the multiple hybrids during the day? Do we see any trends? And so when we started analyzing [the list] of students that don’t meet the minimum minutes right now, we saw a trend that they were in that first period, hybrid AP Comp Sci.”
Kloppenburg also explained that many options were considered during the process of finding a solution.
“One option was to change that class to traditional, and then another option would be we have to ask those students to take another class, but like I said, they had hybrid first period, and a lot of them have a hybrid fifth period and zero does not count in minutes,” Kloppenburg said.
In the end, the administration office chose to convert the first period AP Comp Sci hybrid class to a traditional class after speaking to Ryan Pham, the teacher for the AP class.
While the reasons for this change are valid, some students found it distracting.
Junior Chloe Pham said, “I don’t see any benefits to this change—normally when I had my hybrid first period, I would go to the library and do my homework. Now with the class switching back to normal, we just do study hall from Tuesday to Thursday which is basically the same but in a more confined, louder space.”
Other students expressed frustration at the limited options available to them once the change was announced.
“It was extremely unfair to tell us randomly after over two weeks of classes, because by then, most of the classes were already full and we were unable to change our schedule,” junior Caitlynn Year said.
For senior Kami Nguyen, the adjustment had a significant impact on her mornings.
“Having a first period hybrid class greatly benefited my schedule because not only did it allow me to actually get more sleep, but it also saved me the time of waiting in the morning traffic lines,” Nguyen said. “I understand the reasoning why our school had to make this difficult decision, but it just sucks for students like me who qualify for a first period hybrid class.”
Kloppenburg and the administration understand how schedule changes affect students’ days.
“[Shifting the class] is not something we ever want to do, because that’s disruptive to students, especially, you know, a few weeks into the school year. So it’s not something we wanted to do at all, and we feel really bad for all students who were already meeting their instructional minutes,” Kloppenburg said.
Kloppenburg addressed this dissatisfaction when she said, “next year we’re gonna be a little more cognizant as we schedule students and have them sign up for hybrids.”
