By Olivia Stubbs
Design Editor

If you’re a big fan of the Pine Whispers, you would know that last February, I wrote about the potential pitfalls of the new Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools calendar. Now that we’re two months into the 2024-2025 school year, it’s time to update on the results so far. Unfortunately, it seems like many of my anticipated complications have played out before our eyes, so let’s unpack what’s happened.

The obvious place to start is the two-weeks-earlier first day of school, the most prominent difference we’ve experienced. I predicted this change would have significant and somewhat tricky repercussions in February. Now, reflecting on its impact, I believe that I was correct.

By starting school just two weeks into August, our summer break was cut short from eleven weeks last year to nine weeks this year. From an outside perspective, this may seem insignificant, but as a student, I noticed its effects. The school year is so hectic and demanding that summer break is an essential respite. With this downtime cut short, many other students and I didn’t have enough time to fully recuperate from the previous school year.

Another unfortunate aspect of our early start was its influence on seniors applying to college. Most colleges and universities don’t release their requirements on the Common Application until August 1. This gave my peers and me less than two weeks to work on our applications before the barrage of assignments from our classes began.

This impact on seniors is unfair, putting us at a disadvantage to seniors in other districts who started school later and, therefore, had more time to work on applications unencumbered by the stress of school. If we had begun at the end of August, as per usual, I would have most likely completed my supplemental essays before the first day of school. Yet, I’m now stuck trying to complete my applications while also balancing a heavy load of schoolwork.

While I predicted some of the issues that occurred this August, I didn’t anticipate the new timeline’s impact on our counselors in Student Services. With the first day two weeks earlier, the counselors had two fewer weeks to solve the puzzle of student class schedules. PowerSchool, the program through which counselors place students into classes, was unavailable until mid-July for yearly maintenance. Thus, counselors had to race to complete the schedules of over fifteen hundred students by the first day of school. 

This near-impossible task was made worse by a frenzy of parents and students looking to have scheduling issues solved. Some students were missing courses or had classes at Career Center and Reynolds scheduled simultaneously, causing alarm. Clearly, this predicament led to an undue amount of stress on both counselors and students: stress that could have been avoided if the new calendar had considered this issue.

While our early start caused a host of problems, the rest of the school year is yet to come. Many aspects of the calendar are anticipated to be positive changes, such as midterms occurring before winter break and the last day of school on May 20, 2025. To understand the full impact of the new calendar, we will have to wait and see how the rest of the year pans out.