On April 12, the Bonita Vista High (BVH) faculty held meetings on campus to discuss potential changes to the academic calendar for the upcoming 2024-2025 school year. Each department—including english, math, science and history—all held their respective meetings on different areas on campus with their department’s teachers to give feedback to administration.
Accelerated Biology, Biology and Forensics teacher Joseph Szakovits explains that these meetings are weekly occurrences on minimum days. A majority of these meetings are dedicated to Professional Learning Community (PLC) work, which focuses on assessments and academic instruction.
“We meet as a department basically every week that there is a minimum day and normally that is devoted towards PLC work. PLC work is looking at assessments, developing assessments, figuring out what our lesson plans are going forward, how our instruction forms those lesson plans, that is what happens on a typical day to day basis,” Szakovits said.
Szakovits explains that one of the roles of a teacher is to gather information from classes and students. Within the meetings, the teachers in each department relay information to the administrative team. This way, the teachers are able to inform the administrators of anything going on within or outside of the classroom.
“These meetings also serve the function as kind of a ‘go’ between the administration—that’s the principal, assistant principals—and the teachers. It’s kind of our job to relay information from the administrative team to the members of our department,” Szakovits said.
Szakovits and International Baccalaureate (IB) Literature HL 1, Theory of Knowledge and English Language Development (ELD) 1-2 teacher Jason Good are considered department chairs for their respective departments. Their responsibility is to maintain clear, efficient conduit for information from teachers to administration.
“I organize thoughts and present them to other teachers to get feedback. It’s kind of just a consolidation of ideas, like ‘This is what we want to see happening and how we want to do it,’” Good said. “And then as department chair I take that information, and I share it with the administrative team.”
The main objective of these weekly PLC meetings is for the department staff to provide feedback to BVH administration on how to alter the upcoming academic calendar. Good explains that there were three primary goals for the meeting held on April 12.
“The main[goal] was to go over next year’s academic calendar, like when we would have a minimum day. The second goal was to talk about the end of the year department awards since every year departments acknowledge a group of students for [their] performance in that department,” Good said. “The other goal was to talk about the way classes would be allocated between different teachers.”
The allocation of classes to specific teachers was one point that English 9, IB Literature HL 2 and ELD 1-2 teacher Raymond Chhan felt was especially important. As a teacher within the English department—a required class for all students—allocating classes for next year’s incoming freshmen is a very important part that takes priority.
“There’s a lot of work that has to be discussed, like, ‘How many students are coming in?’, ‘How many classes of each class are we going to be available to teach?’ So for example, there might be fifteen 9th grade English classes,” Chhan said. “From there, it’s up to us as the [English] department to determine who’s going to take on how many sections of each class.”
Despite the hectic process of determining the schedule for the upcoming school year, Szakovits explains that transparency is the overall goal of these meetings. All teachers are involved in the process and all teachers are given the opportunity to voice concerns to better accommodate everyone’s wants and needs.
“[The administrative team] put together a calendar and they highlighted a series of changes that are being made to next year’s calendar relative to what we did this year,” Szakovits said. “I think the idea behind that is the admin team doesn’t want to just make big changes without consulting anyone; they want there to be transparency to that process.”
