Bearden counselors launch virtual class registration system for 2021-22 school year

With May only three months away, Bearden staff and students have to start the process of thinking about the 2021-2022 school year.

At this point in the year, teachers have put in recommendations for their students about the core classes that they should take next year, and freshmen, sophomores, and juniors are beginning to think about the electives they will finally qualify for. 

Across the student body, students are starting to strategize with their teachers and peers about the classes that they should take. The registration process for the 2021-22 school year started Tuesday during 30 in 3rd.

Like the majority of this school year, due to the ever-present Covid-19, class registration looks a little bit different. In years past, guidance counselors visited classrooms and gave students an in-depth rundown of the classes that they need for graduation, electives that Bearden offers, and how to request desired classes for the next school year.

For the next two weeks in advisory, students will be required to work through a self-paced module in their class page in Canvas that was created by the guidance counselors. Here, students will get the same information that they would have received via classroom visits in previous years.

At the end of the two weeks in advisory, students will have acquired the information and resources needed in order to send their requests for classes through Aspen. 

“Before, it would be a 90-minute presentation in your class where we are just information overloading you, but hopefully with it broken down over a couple of days, it will have more time to sink in,” sophomore counselor Mrs. Nicole Mullinax said. “I think that this could be a more efficient way of presenting this information to students as long as the advisory teachers and students actually do it.”

While this new form of registration has the potential to be a more effective way to pass information along to students, the counseling department is also prepared to handle any challenges that might arise with the new system.

“I feel like it is set up in a way that is very detailed, but I worry about the completion of it, so we are going to have to monitor and see who hasn’t done it, and we have reserved the week before spring break to pull students who have not done it down from classrooms to meet with us,” said Mrs. Beverly Anderson, the head of the counseling department.

Despite not initially visiting classrooms as in years past, guidance counselors have been working extremely hard to accommodate student needs for this upcoming process.

“We asked ourselves, how do we provide services equitably to virtual students and the reality is, while we would love to meet with students one-on-one individually, or to go walk into a classroom and to walk students through it, the reality is that we knew we had to plan for red days,” Mrs. Anderson said. “So, that drove our planning in terms of providing the services to students this year.”

That contingency plan has already come into play, as the process started yesterday during a virtual inclement weather day.

The week before spring break, guidance counselors will hold office hours in the cafeteria during all lunches to give students ample opportunities to ask questions concerning course registration for the upcoming school year. 

If this form of registration proves to be efficient, students may see it again next year.

“If this goes well, and depending what next year looks like with virtual and in-person students, doing registration this way again is definitely a possibility,” Mrs. Mullinax said.