ON SCHEDULE: Associate superintendent Carl Leppelman, upper right, talks to the audience about the proposed Rio Rancho High School schedule at a public forum in the school's cafeteria Wednesday night.

RRHS to get new class schedule next year

By Eric Maddy
The SCORE

Rio Rancho High School students will have a new schedule next year. Just what exactly that schedule has yet to be determined.

Parents and students got their first look at a proposed schedule that has an eight-period day at a public forum at the Rio Rancho High cafeteria Wedneday night.

"The decision to move off the block has been made because of input from the (school) board," said. Carl Leppelman, the Associate Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction for the district "We met with teachers. We met with teacher union management. And they concur. We need a change."

Rio Rancho High has been on a block schedule since it opened in for the 1996-97 school year. The current schedule has four classes that are one hour, 49 minutes long with a 50 minute break for lunch, including a seven-minute “passing period.”

But because the block period means in essence double time for classes, some students are able to complete graduation requirements for core courses such as English and math before their senior year. As a result of a year off, 42 percent of Rio Rancho High graduates have to take remedial classes in college in those subject areas.

The new schedule will allow the school to schedule core courses every day for all four years students are in high school.

"With regard to math and other subjects, basically if you don't use it you lose it," RRHS principal Richard Von Ancken told about 50 parents, students and teachers who attended the forum. "And when you go to college, you end up in a remedial class. You don't get credit for it. And you, the parent, end up paying for it. Literally paying for it. "

Test scores of juniors in 2006-07 also lagged behind similar schools. According to district statistics, 62.1 percent were considered “proficient and above” in reading.

“Is that good enough? No. It needs to be better. We could do better,” Leppelman said. “We know our mid-high has done better. We also know that our elementary and middle schools are performing at a higher level. It’s still a respectable number.

“When we look at math, however, we realize inherently in the schedule something has happened.”

Only 52 percent were in the proficient or above level in math testing in 2006-07.

And while both areas have improved in recent years – math has come up from 45 percent in the past two years -- it still leaves the district behind state benchmarks that continue to increase every year. In essence, even though RRHS is improving, it is still falling further behind state requirements.

“This is the area where we got dinged,” Leppelman said

As a result, the school has been placed in “corrective action” status by the New Mexico Department of Education after two years of being listed as a “school in need of improvement.” Among its recommendations: core classes should meet every day and every year to close gaps in achievement and more “time on task,” meaning time spent in the classroom.

“If we were to go to Restructuring I, which is the next level of corrective action, they can tell us to change the schedule. They can tell us to change the staff and the administration. We lose control of the decisions we are able to make if we don’t make decisions ourselves (now).

“We can choose to be in control of our own destiny or we can let them decide.”

The district has “put a lot of things in place” to avoid additional state intervention, Von Ancken said. “The problem is it’s not enough. It’s too little to late. Part of the problem is our 4 x 4 accelerated block schedule.”

Leppelman said, “We need to look at this as a community. This is not just a Rio Rancho High School issue. This is a city-wide issue.”

Leppelman said the district has been studying the scheduling issue for more than six years.

The schedule presented is based on one that serves Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. The Rio Rancho has seven 49-minute classes, with first period five minutes longer to accommodate late-arriving bus students as the continues to outgrow its available transportation, a problem the Rio Rancho school board looked at in depth on Monday night.

According to its web site, Stevenson High “has been named one of America's best schools six times and has been the recipient of numerous accolades from the U.S. Department of Education, including three Blue Ribbon Awards. In the year 2000, Stevenson was named one of 27 New American High Schools. New American Schools are innovative learning organizations whose whole-school reform efforts enable their students to excel.”

The eighth time slot includes a 35-minute lunch, including a five-minute passing period at each end, and 19 minutes that could be used for tutoring/remediation or added to the previous class to create a mini-block class for classes like science and dance where extra time might be needed to run experiments or change clothes. The 19 minutes could conceivably be added to lunch as well as an incentive for student performance.

Under the proposed schedule, classes would be shortened by five minutes on the second day of the week to allow teachers time to meet with colleagues. Usually the alternate schedule would be on Tuesdays, but it could be pushed forward to Wednesdays on weeks where holidays like the coming Martin Luther King Birthday holiday is observed. Busses would run on the same schedule every day, transportation director Theresa Saiz said, with students expected to use the 40-minutes before the first bell for library work, to eat breakfast that some are not getting due to crunched bus timelines or to seek tutoring and other assistance.

Overall, the school day would be 17 minutes longer than the current schedule, with proposed duty time for staff being 7:10 a.m. to 2:40 p.m. Within that framework teachers would get 375 minutes of prep time each week, including the alternate schedule, 30 minutes of duty-free lunch plus 19 minutes of prep time (the 19 minutes students have off) and one prep period during the day.

As a result, the number of credits needed to graduate could actually be reduced from 29 (out of 32 possible) to 27 (out of 28 possible) over a four-year period. That stilll exceeds the state minimum of 24 credits.

Von Ancken said he believes the schedule can be accomplished with the same number of teachers, though some additional security staff and counselors may be needed, especially to help seniors who have planned their final year based on the block format.

“Since 1996-97, the world has changed,” Von Ancken said. “Different requirements have been placed on schools. It’s no longer the same place, and we want to keep up with the changes going on in the world around us.”

The Stevenson High regular schedule, taken from the school’s web site, varies slightly in that it has detention periods before and after school. The school day doesn’t begin until 8:05 a.m., has 50-minute classes, five-minute passing periods but doesn’t end until 3:25 p.m.

A look at other areas of Stevenson’s web site seems to offer compelling reasons for their schedule. School enrollment has been above 4,000 since 2001, with a high-water mark of 4573 in the 2005-06 school year. According to the school’s 2006 annual report, the last one posted on its web site, “Stevenson’s Class of 2006 earned the highest composite ACT score in school history and set new records on each section of the college entrance examination.”

Stevenson’s composite score for 2005-06 was 25.6, exceeding the previous best of 25.1 set the previous year. The state average was 20.5 and the national average was 21.1. The ACT scoring scale is 1 to 36.

It marked the fourth straight year Stevenson’s graduating seniors have established a record-high score on the ACT, and the ninth time in
10 years.

On Advanced Placement exams, Stevenson also set new standards. More SHS students than ever before (1,406) took a school record number of AP exams (3,085), the 12th consecutive year Stevenson has set records in both categories.

The Class of 2006 at Stevenson set a new record on the mathematics portion of the SAT, and outpaced the state and nation in all three areas of the college entrance exam. Stevenson’s 2006 graduates posted an average score of 657 (out of a possible 800) on the mathematics portion of the SAT, up from the previous record of 653 set the previous year. Stevenson also exceeded the state and nation in the critical reading section (formerly verbal) and the new writing portion.

More information on the proposed schedule is available on the school’s web site, http://www.rrps.net/Newrrhs/index.htm. To read more about Stevenson High, go to http://www.district125.k12.il.us/.