New Conference Schedule Brings Change for 2015-16 School Year

Next year’s conference schedule will look very different to returning Northwest Academy community members.

Students will no longer have end-of-semester conferences in January and June. Instead, these conference weeks will be broken up into three two-days increments in November and in February.

Rachael Torchia, Middle School Coordinator, said that the faculty council created this new schedule as a response to community feedback.

“We’ve [talked to] students, parents and teachers about conferences,” Torchia said. “The biggest thing that came up over all of these conversations was timing. Those end-of-year conferences just aren’t as effective for people because it’s really late in the year to check in.”

According to this new schedule, every student will have a conference within the school year. Conferences will now be held around Thanksgiving, Veterans Day and Presidents’ Day. Students will not have school on these days, but will have to attend a scheduled conference.

Seventh graders and freshmen will have their conferences on November 9th and 10th. Eighth graders and juniors will attend conferences on February 11th and 12th, while seniors will be able to pick the day of their conferences.

In past years, students have attended school on the Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving break. Next year, sixth graders and sophomores will have their conferences on these two days, November 24th and 25th, giving all other students a week-long break.

Prior to the change, students have had a two-week winter break, come back for dead week, taken their finals and then had a week off for conferences.

“It just felt like they were on vacation for the whole [month] of January,” Torchia said. “School got really choppy and inconsistent and giving everyone feedback back was hard.”

Mary Folberg, Head of School, approves of the new schedule because she believes that end-of-semester conferences are often focused more on the student’s grade then their work.

“The emphasis–not on the part of the kids, but the part of the parents–is too often what this grade is,” Folberg said. “We are much more interested in talking about how that student learns, what they can do to work more efficiently and their work habits. The grade is less important to us–we feel we’re laying the groundwork for outstanding work later on, so that’s where the emphasis should be.”

Folberg and Torchia have been discussing re-arranging the conference schedule for two or three years. Folberg said that the faculty and staff were too busy preparing for the site visit to consider it.

“Whenever there’s change there’s a lot of angst,” Folberg said. “There’ll be people who say, ‘What! What’re they doing?’ We’re going to be relying on our students to explain this change to parents.”