While many students of Cherry Hill East are beginning to prepare to take mid terms and the PARCC exams, the guidance counselors are preparing the students’ schedules for the next school year.

East uses a program called Chancery SMS. This program allows guidance counselors to insert all of the student’s chosen courses and create their schedules.

Although we like to imagine that our schedules are created almost immediately after we have the course selection meeting and submit the blue forms, the process can actually take months.

“[This process] usually takes all of February and all of March and then we work on preliminary schedule running in April,” said Mr. Roberto Figueroa, East guidance counselor

First the guidance counselors must meet with every student in the building (usually starting with juniors, sophomores and then freshmen), and then wait for them to submit their forms.  Once all the forms are submitted, including the incoming freshmen’s, the guidance counselors will plug the information into Chancery SMS and even then it is still possible that there will be a mistake in the schedules.

“[The system] doesn’t necessarily pick wrong courses but it may… put a student in a lab out but they don’t lab out but it won’t put a student in environmental studies unless we picked it,” said Figueroa.

Using the Chancery SMS system is a main factor as to why students are unable to request a certain teacher.

“We don’t even have that option in the course selection process… it’s a different aspect of the system,” said Figueroa.

With course selection just around the corner, students should start thinking about what classes they want to take in the 2015-2016 school year.