In an email sent to high school staff on Friday, Head of School Anthony Meyer and Assistant Head of School Hal Mason unveiled their latest iteration of the draft schedule for the 2025-26 school year. Compared to the previous draft, the new version allocates more overall time for X-block and less for T-block, and shortens passing time, among other changes. Meyer also included these updates in his “Warrior Bi-Weekly” email to students and families on Monday.

The need to change the high school’s schedule arose after a state investigation determined that the high school was roughly 50 hours short of the required 990 hours of “structured learning time” for the 2024-25 school year. The high school has until July 11 to submit a plan to address this gap for next year.

Meyer and Mason confirmed in their email that next year’s schedule is viewed as a temporary one-year pilot to address the current schedule’s issues. Another more permanent schedule with a “better structure” for the school to meet state requirements in future years will begin construction during collective bargaining next year.

The most recently proposed changes to the 5-day schedule, as outlined in Meyer and Mason’s email, are summarized below.

The updated draft rotates T and X-blocks so that each occurs every other 5-day week, still a decrease from the 2024-25 schedule, where each occurs every 5-day week. The draft also lengthens both T and X-block by eight minutes.

Meyer and Mason wrote in the email that these changes were proposed after the initial draft, which had removed X-block from the 5-day schedule, had incited opposition from some students and had been “broadly viewed as a significant loss for student clubs, extra help, and student government.”

Both T and X-block still appear in the 4-day schedule. T-block counts towards structured learning time, and X-block does not, according to Superintendent Dr. Linus Guillory.

Time between periods, which is currently seven minutes long, has been shortened in the draft to five minutes. According to the email, passing time was recently lengthened to seven minutes because of the time it takes to travel between 22 Tappan and 115 Greenough. Curriculum coordinators are already planning how teachers can support students with cross-campus travel in a reduced time frame, the email said.

An option to minimize individual students’ travel time would be to cluster classes that are physically closer to one another, Meyer and Mason wrote.

“This would mean, for example, a freshman taking Chinese 1 in 115 [Greenough] would find (as much as possible) their wellness class, their drawing class, and their chorus class adjacent to each other,” Meyer and Mason wrote. “This type of soft cohorting will serve to greatly minimize the expected times that a student might be ‘legitimately’ a couple of minutes late to class.”

Other 5-day schedule changes include starting school five minutes earlier, ending five minutes later, reducing Z-block (which does not count toward structured learning time) by 15 minutes every week and increasing the time spent in each class by 16 minutes every week.

Administrators are still considering additional changes to improve block timing consistency and fill the unused eight minutes at the end of the day on Fridays.

This is a developing story. Check back for more updates.