Upper school students and faculty finished their six week trial period of the pilot bell schedule today and will return to the old schedule on Monday.

The pilot bell schedule featured four different types of days: A, B, C and D. Each class was held every alternate day in 85 minute block periods with 10 minute passing periods in between. Every school day began at 8 a.m. and ended at 2:50 p.m. The schedule also incorporated more long lunches and extra help periods and a collaboration period after school.

Challenge Success, a club that works to reduce student stress, worked with faculty committees and the administration to design the pilot bell schedule. Club officers announced the trial period of the pilot bell schedule at a school meeting in October.

Kshithija Mulam

“A lot of other schools in the Bay Area and research has shown that block schedules reduce stress in most students; that was the goal of Challenge Success and that’s still its goal,” Challenge Success officer Sandip Nirmel (11) said.

The trial period was initially designed to last four weeks starting from Jan. 4, but positive feedback and the need for more data in order to make a decision about the future of the schedule led to the trial period being extended two more weeks to today.

Although some students initially disliked the pilot bell schedule at the beginning of the trial period, several discovered elements of the schedule that they found helpful.

“At first, I hated [the new bell schedule] with a passion because they had given me a plethora of projects, tests, and quizzes all in the same week, but afterwards, when we started off a new semester, it was great. It’s a lot less stressful,” Linus Li (10) said.

Administration and faculty committees designed the schedule with the intent of reducing student stress by providing a less hectic learning environment, which some students felt the effect of by not having each class every day.

“[The new bell schedule] gives you more time between classes, so now we don’t have every single class on Mondays since we don’t have homework for every class on Monday,” Challenge Success officer Naomi Molin (12) said. “I know that the administrators and faculty, they have been researching this kind of schedule for a while.”

The pilot bell schedule will be implemented in the next academic year after the administration considers the data received from the trial period and makes the appropriate changes needed for the schedule to run smoothly.