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schedule change

September 2, 2009

To manage crowding, Francis Lewis HS plans a 13-period day

by Philissa Cramer, at 11:45 am

Last year, the school day at packed-to-the-gills Francis Lewis High School in Queens lasted 12 periods to accommodate all 4,500 students. This year, the number of periods is rising to 13, writes Arthur Goldstein, the UFT chapter leader at Francis Lewis, in GothamSchools’s community section.

A 13-period day can only exacerbate the scheduling problems that already plague the school, Goldstein writes:

When you have 12 periods, when you have three sessions, you can never get the staff together, you can never get the department together, and every meeting becomes 3 meetings. Kids eat lunch at 9 in the morning. They come in for free breakfast and have five minutes to eat it and show up to my class. Kids come running into the trailer with styrofoam trays full of what appears to be styrofoam food. …

So how do you fix a school that has 12 periods? Well, this year, we’re gonna make it 13 periods.

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  • QueensParent

    I have little sympathy here. Francis Lewis HS has had several opportunities to reduce its enrollment over the years but the school’s leadership prefers to keep the school extra large because doing so swells the school’s budget and allows it to hire lots of staff. This is the case with many “overcrowded” schools that complain about overcrowding but are always looking to take in more students. Principals well know this: with less students, you get less money and therefore less teachers and other staff, so while they may feign to swoon about overcrowded they are just watch what happens when more of the Queens high schools open up. Magically, they won’t be reducing their own numbers.

  • http://none Kumbaya

    QueensParent, you have absolutely no idea of what you are talking about! Be careful of spreading such bull caca as people actually might believe you. I can assure that a principal who is in a successful school would never, ever want to overcrowd their school. The extra students does absolutely nothing but increase their workload. It is not like they get a bonus for the additional students. It is not about the money but about the quality of education and services that a school can provide that is in question. When students go to 13 periods the resources of the school are stretched very, very thin. If you were a QueensParent of a student who went to this school, you might have a different take on the matter. Please, do us a favor and speak of what you know, and not complete thrash that you wrote in this post. P.S. a concerned educator turned adminstrator.

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