AISD School Schedules Are Weirdly Diverse

Important distinction: I'm talking about the structure of classes in a week here, not the structure of periods within a day. Bell schedules don't say much about a school. I'm not sure these maps say much, either, but they're more interesting.

The high school map is so simple that making it at all felt like a waste of time. All the zoned high schools in the Austin Independent School District have the same schedule every week.

All of these schools use a block A/B day schedule. Mondays and Wednesdays are always A days, Tuesdays and Thursdays are always B days, and Friday rotates between being an A or B day week by week. As far as I know, Fridays are the same A/B day for every school in the district in a given week. [This is wrong. A reader of the blog (didn't know I had those!) let me know that after a schedule disruption, each campus chooses if Friday should be an A or B day, so the schools will probably fall out of sync in a few weeks.] Each week is ABABA or ABABB. Not particularly interesting.

Middle schools are much weirder.

My first thought after completing this map was "Man, it's weird how regional these schedule types are." And it is notable; schools with almost nothing in common like O. Henry and Covington have the same schedule format for seemingly no reason... but their zones touch. Besides that, there's a lot more going on here.

Four schools use the same format as the high schools, although I'm not sure if their Friday rotations match. Four other schools, including the aforementioned O. Henry and Covington, have the same fixed A and B days as the high schools with Friday being an all-class "C Day" instead of rotating. More schools used this ABABC model in previous years, but it seems to be falling out of favor. Bedichek also has a fixed C day, but on Monday for some reason, with every week being CABAB. This angers me greatly for no obvious reason.

A cluster of four more schools in East-Northeast Austin uses a block schedule with no fixed days but instead rotating weeks. An " A Week" with three A days, ABABA, is followed by a "B Week" with the opposite schedule, BABAB. I went to one of these schools (Kealing) and was shocked to find that any other system existed upon graduating. The remaining schools use the simplest system of all; students go to every class every day. I thought about calling this system "All C," but that makes no sense outside the context of an A/B block schedule. This is also how pretty much every elementary school operates. The traditional schedule seems to be picking up steam among middle schools, with none of the three schools on the system having that structure five years ago.

There's no elementary school map. Did you really want one?

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