Almost every student at Akins has endured the experience of being scheduled into the wrong class.

This is unfortunately an all-too-common and maddening experience. I personally had the maddening experience of being stuck in a college preparatory math class for about a month despite having passed the Texas Success Initiative test during my junior year. Now that I have been rescheduled for the pre-calculous class that I wanted to take, I have been forced to make up an entire month’s worth of lessons that I missed during this scheduling mess.

This is not meant to be a slight to our hardworking counselors, but I do have a few suggestions that I think could help alleviate these types of problems.

One of the largest issues every year is that students can spend weeks waiting for times when their counselors are available to adjust their schedules. Even without my specific circumstances, most appointments can often take over half an hour per student. This means students who go to their counselor’s offices during class often waste their own time and their teachers’ class time waiting in queues outside of the office.

Ideally, there would be time for counselors to catch these kinds of simple scheduling problems before the school year begins. However, we know that is not the case so there needs to be a better system to meet with counselors to quickly address these problems to avoid having students placed in the wrong classes for long periods of time.

Our counselors need all of the support and resources possible to help reduce the number of students who fall through the cracks because of the difficult systems they are forced to use to do their jobs.

That’s why, in addition to more double-checking for accuracy I believe the school should have an online  appointment scheduling platform where students can see counselor’s aviailability and pick times to visit their or other available counselors, helping both the students and counselors organize rescheduling on a single online platform.

This change would help counselors across academies to organize their appointments with students on a connected platform and could reduce the number of emails from students seeking appointments, improving the counselors’ response times for students emailing about info or other concerns.

The final improvement I would like to see is more on the Austin Independent School District’s (AISD) side, updating the unresponsive and outdated user interface of the TEAMS program used for attendance and scheduling.

As I’m sure all students and teachers can attest to, TEAMS, created by Frontline Education and used by multiple Texas school districts, is an unstable and often volatile software whose servers crash during high-use periods, like when students and teachers scramble to check and update grades at the end of a grading period.

Even when it is working, the user interface of the site leaves much to be desired and can partially be blamed for the amount of class misplacements. A counselor I’ve spoken to has even told me that the site is slow and difficult to navigate, which could be responsible for the long nature of visits that could stand to be improved.

If these changes to the appointment and scheduling platforms students use — along with additional resources for counselors — students’ time spent with counselors altering schedules could stand to be greatly reduced.