NEWS RELEASE: Roseville Community Schools Makes the Switch to Semesters
Beginning in the fall of the 2021-2022 school year, Roseville Community Schools will be making the switch from trimesters to semesters. The district has been running trimesters since the 2008-2009 school year.
Roseville made the initial switch from semesters to trimesters in hopes that offering trimesters would provide additional opportunities for students. Superintendent Mark Blaszkowski said that the drawbacks began to outweigh the added opportunities. “We noticed that changing teachers three times a year made it difficult for teachers to establish relationships with students and research has shown that relationships have one of the biggest impacts on learning. Additionally, it made it difficult for students to start over with a new teachers’ expectations and classroom procedures.” Assistant Superintendent Dave Rice added that establishing relationships with students is often a key to academic success. “The longer teachers have to build relationships with students, the greater the opportunity for student success. Students and teachers change courses once during the year in semesters, versus twice with trimesters, greatly reducing the shuffle of students between teachers.” Trimesters also created a scheduling imbalance for students where some courses ran two out of three trimesters, leaving the need for filler classes in a students’ schedule.
Rice said that the district had been discussing the return to semesters for several years. “The disruption to the learning process caused by the pandemic created an opportunity for us to return to semesters without much of a distraction to students and families. Although the data has shown that the stability of semesters for teacher-student relationships is very important at the secondary level, it truly does not affect the elementary students since they stay with the same teacher all year.” Rice added that there are still state graduation requirements that must be followed and students will continue to have ample opportunities to explore electives.
While change can be a challenge for staff and students, Blaszkowski thinks that this is the right time to make the switch to semesters. “Our technology team has been working diligently to ensure that all the necessary changes are made in our student management system – making new courses that are semester-based. It will be difficult, but our counseling department has developed a grid to calculate the number of required graduation credits and what classes students need to help guide them for the next couple of years.”
The change from trimesters to semesters creates a four-year sliding scale, but graduation requirements for each individual year are posted and reviewed with each class. The graduation requirement scale can be found under parent resources on the district web page.
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