Free at Last: Making the Most of the Flexible Block Schedule.

Madeira’s interest in The Coalition of Essential Schools and a large increase in enrollment presented us with the opportunity to change many of the things that had frustrated us in a traditional junior high school setting. One of the first struggles that emerged during the planning stage was designing a daily schedule. Most of the teachers on the committee had little or no experience with the overwhelming complexity of school scheduling. All we knew was that we did not like the one we had: a nine-period day with 42-minute sessions was hardly conducive to serious learning. Hank Ohnmeis, the assistant principal, and Tony Dunn, the guidance counselor, were the committee members who came to our rescue. They labored through five revisions of a block schedule until they developed one that was acceptable to all. The final version was a flexible block schedule that contained two-hundred-eighty minutes of time for teams to schedule any way they thought appropriate.