In the fall of 2025, the scheduling committee—which focuses on improving the school’s schedule—began discussing possible changes to the everyday schedule for the first time since 2020.
This January, math teacher Jason Aigen spoke with faculty and held gradewide meetings with students to hear input on the current schedule. Although the scheduling committee originally planned to make adjustments to the current schedule a few years ago, Assistant Principal for School Life Quinn Killy said the COVID-19 pandemic and a change of administrators postponed the schedule change.
“We’ve gone through a couple principals, so it’s been paused,” Killy said. “We’re two years behind when we would have liked.”
Aigen said Interim High School Principal Chris Levy decided to reopen the schedule-changing process. Levy and Aigen moved forward after receiving a go-ahead from Head of School Russell Shaw.
“Chris [Levy] was kind of instrumental in getting me to do this last time around, and I had offered in the fall to start looking at it again,” Aigen said. Levy was assistant principal for academics at the time of the previous schedule change.
Aigen specialized in schedule development before teaching, and he also designed schedules at two other schools.
The scheduling committee—which, alongside Aigen, includes science teacher Greg Dallinger and History Department Chair James Elish—is now in the process of reviewing the feedback they received during student and faculty meetings. “We’ll go through all the data and look for patterns, look for things that stand out and go from there,” Aigen said.
“I really do like [the current schedule],” senior Alexander Bobo said. “It feels like a relaxing environment.” In the odd/even rotation, classes meet every other day. Bobo said he liked the rotation because he has two nights to review concepts before his next class.
Aigen said he has received mixed student and faculty feedback about class length and how often classes meet.
“[Changing class length and frequency] is not something we’re going to be doing in the first step,” Aigen said. Aigen estimated that substantial changes to the schedule would take four or five years to plan because community members have such varied opinions about the schedule. “We’re just collecting data to see what faculty and kids want,” Aigen said.
Aigen said he wants to ensure that any changes to the schedule do not make it more difficult for the next assistant principal for academics to schedule students’ classes. Assistant Principal for Academics Khalid Bashir, who is leaving GDS at the end of June, currently manages course registration and students’ schedules.
Aigen said several students and faculty thought the ten-minute transition period between the last two periods of the day was unnecessary. Aigen said the committee may lengthen lunch by moving five minutes from the transition period into the lunch period.
“A lot of clubs meet during lunch, so sometimes it’s hard to go to a club meeting and then also go to lunch,” junior Izzy Choudhary, who attended her grade’s meeting with Aigen, said. “I think that it would be a good idea just to give students a little bit more time, and I feel like that [transition] period doesn’t really need to be ten minutes,” Choudhary said.
“I wish I had a little bit more time in between the periods just to relax,” Bobo said about the ten-minute transition period. He said that because classes are 70 minutes long, he would prefer to have a longer break between the last two periods of the day.
Aigen said he ultimately received “very little response” from the student input meetings. Aigen said he received more feedback from upperclassmen than from underclassmen; he said only one freshman and a few sophomores attended their grades’ meetings. Aigen said he thinks upperclassmen know the current schedule better and therefore have stronger opinions about what should change. Aigen said he hopes to receive more suggestions from students and faculty as data processing continues.
“Sending out feedback forms would be really effective to make sure that students actually want the changes that are happening to happen,” Choudhary said.