The Guidance Department has instituted a new course registration system this year. The new system is mainly electronic, and involves less stress and work for students.

“We’ve decided that it was time to move on to doing online course registration,” said Patricia Huebner, Director of Guidance. “I’m hoping that this makes it more efficient than all the paperwork of the old system, and that the teachers are spending more time advising with students.”

Each student had conferences with their individual teachers regarding their class choices for next year, and the teachers entered their recommendations into the computer system. The students then each received a form detailing all the classes recommended to them with priorities made by the teachers. The students’ only responsibilities were to ultimately choose their classes, get the form signed by a parent or guardian, and show up to their assigned counselor appointment to finalize the classes.

Although there has been plenty of positive feedback about the new system, there have been a few bumps along the road. “The counselors are concerned because students are not coming for their appointments, but that’s always been the case even with the old system,” Huebner said.

Juliana Pellino, sophomore, agreed that the appointments were a problem. “I know so many kids that had no idea when their guidance appointment was, so I feel like that communication could have been improved,” Pellino said.

Another problem has been students forgetting to get their registration sheets signed by a parent or guardian or losing the sheets. “I don’t think the paper sheets are going as well as we hoped, but I think we still needed to keep that in place this year so everybody was on the same page. This is a new process, but I think down the road we want to get everybody used to seeing it [digitally],” Huebner said.

Despite these problems, Krystina Szafran, sophomore, still enjoyed the new system’s simplicity. “I preferred it to last year because you didn’t have to look up all the codes for the classes you wanted. All you had to do was talk to your teacher and it was done for you,” Szafran said. “It was definitely much easier and more resourceful because the school didn’t waste so much paper.”