Schedule decision retrospective

Dylan Berman Co-Editor-in-Chief

Many Arcata High School students have heard whispers and snippets of the debate around our bell schedule. Teachers mention things in class, the administration makes announcements, rumors flourish, but it seems that the full picture of what has happened with our schedule is something elusive.

How was the schedule for this year chosen? Who was involved, whose voices heard, and whose ignored? The school schedule impacts every student and staff member, yet the answers to these questions among students are widely unknown.

Toward the middle of last school year, the AHS administration began the process of deciding a new bell schedule for this year. Superintendent Roger Macdonald assembled a committee of administrators and teachers called the Bell Schedule Committee (BSC).

Teachers could request to be a part of the committee, and then the administration along with the teachers union would review the requests and select members.

“The administration asked [the committee] to look at all of the different schedules from all over, not even talking just the United States…what kind of block schedules do they have and does it abide by our contract and the mandated instruction time,” explained Caroline Bareilles, AHS German teacher and member of the BSC.

The committee came up with a wide selection of different potential schedules, bringing their findings to different departments for feedback, but then around March of last year, these schedules were removed as possibilities because they didn’t fit within the California Department of Education’s required number of yearly minutes or the union contract.

“The union went back and looked at the schedules that were most popular amongst the committee…by the next zoom meeting, those went away. That was around March, ‘’ Bareilles said.

Faculty and union members then put together a new set of schedules as options for voting. Soon after the teachers voted, choosing between six of these schedules using a rank choice voting system.

Rank choice voting refers to a voting system in which voters rank their options in a sequence of first or second (or third, etc.) on their respective ballots.

The schedules thought to be the top two choices were then pitted against each other in a second round of voting.

Then things got a lot more complicated.

The math department sent out a Google document criticizing the use of rank choice voting, claiming that the selection of the two top voted schedules had been miscalculated, and that the vote needed to be held again.

As part of the math department and a member of the BSC, Neva Holladay gave more insight regarding the issues with the vote the math department pointed out.

She explained that in her opinion, rank choice voting was best for much larger populations, and didn’t work well for this scale of vote.

Tiffany Bullman, teacher at McKinleyville High School and the union President for much of last school year, disagreed, defending the use of rank choice voting.

“As a political science teacher, I am a strong supporter of rank choice voting because it gives voters more choices, and it allows them to truly vote for their first choice without fear of wasting their vote,” she explained.

The document sent out by the math department claimed that the schedule that won the vote was ranked by only 56% of teachers as one of their top three choices.

The document also stated that one of the schedule options was incorrectly rejected, despite receiving a high percentage of votes.

The document ends with the proposition to have a second vote, pitting the winning schedule against this allegedly inaccurately removed schedule.

“Do I think we used rank choice voting with integrity? Yes. Do I feel like it is a viable way of coming to a result through an election? Yes. Did everybody feel that way? No,” Mckinleyville High Principal and committee member Nic Collart said.

Bullman was critical of the push back the vote received.

“In my honest opinion, I felt the criticisms only came about because opponents of the block schedule were looking for ways to discredit the vote,” she said. “Once we agreed to a process, we should have stuck with it. The movement to overturn the election should have been squashed early on instead of letting it drag on for the remainder of the school year.”

After much debate following the vote, an executive decision was made by Superintendent Roger Macdonald two days before the end of the last school year to stick with the existing schedule for 2022-23 school year.

“There was a big debate, to the point where the administration said ‘That’s it, we’re gonna keep the same schedule as this year,” Bareilles said, summarizing her view of what happened following the math department’s criticisms.

This decision was also because, according to the current Union President Jennifer Berube as well as other teachers on the committee, the voted on schedule violated the union contract, and required negotiation and further discussion.

An email sent to teachers by Macdonald on Tuesday, June 14th of last school year stated:

“It has become clear that the schedule that was voted on would change working conditions for several staff and would require both parties to come to the table to renegotiate terms so that it would fit the contract.”

In an interview this October Macdonald said that it was debatable whether or not that schedule violated the Union Contract, and that the decision to stick with last year’s schedule had “nothing to do with the union contract.”

Bullman agreed with Macdonald’s recent statements, saying that the schedule did not have any conflict with the contract.

Macdonald affirmed the legitimacy of the vote called into question by the math department.

“The vote was legitimate. The reason we went with a different schedule wasn’t because there was a problem with the vote,” he said.

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