As the 2023-2024 school year comes to a close, freshmen, sophomores, and juniors are on their way, preparing for the following year, although scheduling future classes might not look so familiar.

Starting this school year, Royal Oak High School students will be asked to schedule their classes online through Xello, specifically through the course planner section of the site. Why the switch? Career Development and Testing Coordinator Janet Norling provides insight into why ROHS has chosen this new and improved route.

“With Xello it takes a lot of the work off the secretaries, who used to have to manually input all of the classes. Also things are housed there. We’ve included scholarships, student job opportunities, and now scheduling,” said Norling, rather upbeat about the new way scheduling will help out the staff and minimize their workload.

Although this switch may make it easier on the staff involved in the process, the way it affects students is still rather up in the air. So far there are some perks to the online resource.

According to Norling, each type of course will have its own drop down section. Each section will only have courses available to each specific grade level. For example, if a freshman is scheduling for their sophomore year science classes, they will only be able to choose the two required courses for that year as that is all that’s available to them.

However, the ease in choosing a course may become confusing for some if they have completed certain courses already. Classes that would technically fall under one of the core credits may show up under a separate elective category.

“The most complicated year will be senior year because the requirements are so different and there are so many more courses. So sometimes it’ll look funny because math might be in the elective spot. That’s because if someone completed 4 years of math previously they still have to take a math class but they’ll have to search for it in the elective area,” said Norling.

Although the searching through many electives may be troublesome for seniors and juniors, there is a nice small perk for full year classes. Courses like AP Environmental Science that take up two semesters will only take one click for both semesters to be added. Students will no longer have to search between A and B segments.

“It’s just really clicking buttons. We tested it with 8th graders last year because they have fewer choices and we really just wanted to see if MiStar would migrate the information. But so far the students have really liked it,” said Norling, hopeful that the same success will be seen by this year’s students.

“We’re hoping this will be a long term thing, a lot of it will depend on how it all rolls out doing the entire high school,” she said, seemingly a little concerned about the potential issues and kinks that have not been discovered yet.

Ultimately, students will be scheduling through Xello as it will make it much easier on the staff and hopefully the students as well. Although some issues are still yet to be encountered until scheduling day, the process appears to be streamlined to be the best for everyone and hopefully make a very stressful day, slightly easier.