Next year, Benilde-St. Margaret’s is expanding its community to include a sixth grade. This not only means more students wandering the halls, but younger students with different needs and requirements. To accommodate this new addition, BSM plans to enact another change for next year: a new bell schedule for the Junior High.

The current bell schedule in the Junior High is uneven. In a quarter, odd block days were recorded to run for around 200 minutes longer than the even blocks. However, after talking with the teachers, Junior High principal Rikki Mortl and a research team of teachers and staff have come up with a schedule that tackles that disparity. Susan Hinnendael, a Junior High teacher who conducted a large portion of the research, says that the new schedule will be a hybrid of skinnies and blocks. “It’s going to be very similar to the Senior High schedule, but instead of students having all of their classes be blocked… we’re going to cut [some of] those blocks in half. Okay, so classes like math and English, they would have for about 40 minutes every day, instead of 80 minutes every other day,” Hinnendael said.

Although there will still be A and B days, reflective of the current even and odd day system, this new schedule will remove eight-period days. With these changes, the schedule will be more consistent. “Every day, the kids would have the exact same number of minutes of class… So, [if I was] a teacher, I would know [that] every day I’m going to have my kids for 40 minutes every single day, regardless if it’s a mass day or if it’s a regular school day, I get my kids for 40 minutes… It makes it easier for teachers to plan,” Mortl said.

This new schedule offers not only consistency but shorter class durations, a change sparked by the coming addition of a sixth grade. “Middle school kids need more movement… They can’t be sitting in their seats for that long. And so [the schedule] allows for teachers to be able to provide that without a disruption to their class, and even the ability for teachers to set up their class in a way… that allows the students to come in and kind of know exactly what’s happening because they have it every day,” Hinnendael said.

One notable change is the addition of something called flex. Currently proposed to be around 25 minutes every day, flex would add a “flexibility” to the schedule that would allow students to take classes in the senior high, despite the different bell schedule. It also allows for consistency in the schedule, as the removal of both flex and homeroom during a Mass day would ensure class time remains constant. However, flex is more than just a practical addition. “The [main] purpose of [flex] would be for kids to be able to retake a test or talk to a teacher and get extra help. [But we’re also] going to potentially run some clubs or activities, so if the middle school kids all of a sudden wanted to do a journalism club, they could meet then… Our kids can’t drive. They’re beholden to bigger siblings that can drive, or family or friends or carpools. So we really wanted to try and make sure that we could offer a little bit more during the day,” Mortl said.

This schedule may vary slightly from the Senior High schedule, but instead of acting as an obstacle, Mortl believes the difference will have a much more positive effect. “I think it will give them one more thing to look forward to. As a teenager, you don’t love [doing] the same things every single day, right? [BSM goes] for six years. That’s a long time… So having that change, I think, will help break up their middle school [years from their] high school experience,” Mortl said.