A 7th period is coming to Galileo for the 2024-2025 school year. The school decided to add an extra period to the school day in order to allow students to finish their A-G requirement during the freshmen and sophomore years and have more opportunities to explore other classes the last 2 years in high school that wouldn’t be possible if it were only a 6th-period schedule.
The proposed new schedule was made by math teacher Mr. Ring, who made sure the new schedule would meet the district’s requirements of having 64,800 instructional minutes in a school year and be finalized on April 26th. The district encourages all schools in SFUSD to have a 7th-period schedule as some schools already have a 7th-period schedule.
On the proposed schedule, every Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, each period is 50 minutes long, and lunch would stay 40 minutes. Wednesday and Thursday classes would be an hour and a half block day classes, with Wednesdays being even periods & Thursdays being odd periods.
The administration knows that adding a 7th period may be a difficult transition but in the long run will be beneficial for the students. Principal Panjabi says, “Having a 7th period is challenging but it’s a good idea. Having an extra period to fulfill A-G requirements, it opens more of their time by the time they reach senior year. Most of their required courses would already be done which would then allow them to potentially leave early to take courses in community college, get a job, work on college applications, etc.”
The addition of a 7th period next year has students and teachers feeling a variety of different ways. Some are happy for an additional 7th period which would allow them to go back to their original schedule and do more thighs that they couldn’t have this year. Chemistry teacher Mr. Lee is happy with the schedule, saying, “This year I had to adopt a lot of things to fit the shorter period and I had to adapt my labs so that they could fit within the 75-minute periods and there are some labs that I’m not able to do this year because of how short it is. So since I’ve been teaching 7 years prior, it would be a lot of great information that I had done in the past and I think it would be a lot more familiar and it’s not too much of adaptation.”
AP Environmental Science teacher Ms. Franzen is also glad to have a 7th period, saying, “For me, the alignment will be easy. I’ll just go back to what I used to do. I had to rework my curriculum a lot so I could teach this year because of the shortened bell schedule so we are able to do far fewer field trips than we normally would have. It would also be beneficial to APES to be the sixth and seventh period next year at the end of the school day where we could go on longer trips and not interfere in other classes.”
Some don’t mind as much as they’re used to adapting or so long as it won’t impact their grade. English teacher Ms. Peters remarks, “I’m going to have to shorten my lessons because on non-block day, we only have 50 minutes so I’m just going to have to just plan to overlap into the next classes. I’m used to adapting.I have been here for almost 20 years and I think our schedule has changed five or six times in that time, so I’m used to adapting to the time.” 9th Grader Ahmed O. says “I don’t really care that much as if it’s a class that won’t impact my grade for college, then I don’t really care.”
However, there could be some problems due to long hours of classes that could impact a student’s ability to digest information. 11th grader Tony D. said, “I think it’s a little too much for a student because they kept the same hour, and with 7 periods, it could be a lot to take in per day for a student.”
