Amidst all of the back-to-school hubbub — meeting new friends, teachers and tackling the sudden onslaught of homework — students at Palo Alto High School must also find the time to organize their class schedules.

The schedule changing process can be stressful and complicated. Although students receive their schedules the day before school starts, they must wait until the first day to make ‘wishlist’ changes. This procedure forces students to attend classes they may later drop and/or lose valuable time in classes they have yet to add.

Furthermore, throughout the first week of school, there is an overflow of students trying to change their schedules. Lines at brunch, lunch and before and after school often span almost half the length of the Tower Building.

“I had to go to the Guidance Office four different times, because one time they [the Guidance Office] forgot to change it [my schedule], one time they lost my paper, and then they said I had an incorrect signature and I had to go back,” senior Vincent Gurle says.

Some of the problems related to the schedule change and assignment process could be eased if the administration began the process earlier in the summer.

This past spring, the administration switched to a new course registration system in which students used Infinite Campus to add classes online. In previous years, the administration collected forms from each student that indicated class preferences.

“It [The Infinite Campus system] is the tool the district has given us, and I would say we were successful with it,” Principal Phil Winston says. “There are pieces of the program that we learned better and so next year some of the intricacies behind the scenes will be easier for us, which will hopefully translate to an easier experience for the students.”

Although the registration process itself may have been conducted smoothly, some students were not enrolled in classes they had signed up for.

“I had to change it [my schedule] twice,” junior Tom McHugh says. “Originally, they [the Guidance Office] didn’t give me what I asked for, which was Japanese.”

Other students have had the opposite problem. Gurle was placed in two classes that he had not signed up for.

“I have had several issues with my schedule this year,” Gurle says. “It was just annoying because it was waste of my time and I had to switch classes around and change my schedule completely.”

Winston accredits the difficulties of distributing first or second course choices to the growth of the student body.

“The reality is that you can’t always get what you want, but we do the absolute best we can,” Winston says. “There will be conflicts in people’s schedules which cause them to not get their first choices, and that’s a life lesson we all have to get used to.”

In the meantime, a change in the handling of scheduling could help ease the growing pains. To help alleviate student stress, schedule problems ought to be solved during the week before school begins. In the past, schedules were assigned the first day of school. Allotting an additional day in more recent years has greatly improved the process; therefore, an extra week would be highly beneficial in leaps and bounds. If students with schedule errors could use this time window to work out issues, it would give students a less frantic start to the school year and take a load off the administration.

Although Winston expresses interest in handing out student schedules earlier, he gave reasons why this was not a possibility for the 2011-2012 school year.

“Part of the reason we couldn’t do it this year is because so many changes,” Winston says.  “The district was gracious enough to give us additional periods, which meant we had to open up new sections, which meant we had to move people around. So although people got their schedules a little later than we would have liked, it benefited the entire student population.”

Even with an earlier schedule pick-up day, there will likely still be pressures the first week of school due to student preference. Students may evaluate classes the first week and decide to drop them for another teacher, subject or lane, or try to rearrange everything to score a coveted first or seventh prep period.

“The culture has been student initiated changes for years,” Winston says. “It puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the system”

Students should acknowledge that these are less important changes and learn to accept what comes their way.

Still, many of the problems with schedule assignment — long lines, administrative computer errors — can be attributed to the sheer volume of students clamoring for schedule changes at any given time. A longer window for schedule tweaking means a lighter load for everyone, shorter lines in the Tower Building and fewer errors. Here’s hoping things will change.