Summer Crown At the end of the first semester, we fill out our course selection forms, prematurely anticipating the school year ahead. We then move on and refocus on the year at hand, but before we know it, the year is nearing its end and our new schedules magically appear! Turns out, it’s not actually magic but instead, our wonderful registrars, Ms. Burke and Ms. Rice. After we anxiously turn in our course selection forms, they input the information into a schedule-building software called PowerSchool. The schedule created by PowerSchool is then molded into our block system. Although the software might be appear to be some kind of magic, it’s Ms.Burke and Ms.Rice who must manually count the requests for each course and hand the tallies over to the department heads. Burke explains, “[Department heads] decide which classes might have to be canceled and how many sections there will be of other classes.” In departments where students have multiple options for a course, Ms. Burke and Ms. Rice try to place students in their first choice, but they’re often faced with problems that prevent them from giving students their top pick, such as a class being canceled, over-filled, or unfit with the rest of a student’s schedule. These common obstacles are the toughest part of the job. Burke said, “I love when I can make something for a student work, help them make a schedule full of classes they’re really passionate about…but my least favorite part is when we can’t get them the schedule they want and I have to tell them that.” During add/drop periods, the registrar’s work furiously to organize, place, and replace courses to help create the perfect schedule for every single one of us. They do everything in their power to give students alternative options if the course they are requesting is unavailable. When we are not bombarding the registrar’s office with add/drop forms, Burke and Rice are behind the scenes of another job with highly-anticipated results. Ms. Burke said, “When we’re not doing add/drops or making special schedules, we help make grade report plans and check [that] there aren’t any missing grades before we send the reports out.” During the beginning of each semester, Burke also mentioned that the registrar is responsible for connecting teachers and their courses to MBS direct—the website from which we order our textbooks from. Additionally, she makes sure that all the rosters are in order and up to date.   Our school could not function through a single block, much less an entire school year, without the help of the registrar. The registrars have a lot of courses to keep track of—and even more of us—so next time your schedule doesn’t work out the way you had hoped, it’s important to know that the faces behind [email protected] aren’t to blame.]]>