Rose basketball highlights
Issue 1
September 27th, 2019
Refresh promotes academic stability
FRI. | 09-24-21 | NEWS
SAT. | 10-10-20 | NEWS
Refresh is an innovative flex period that was incorporated into Rose’s schedule during the 2018-2019 school year and is designed to provide equitable opportunities for all of Rose’s students.
Rose’s Refresh Reform Facilitator and social studies teacher, Sam Lee, plays a major role in coordinating Refresh and ensuring that it runs smoothly. He aims to allow extra time during the school day for students who may not have that extra time after school to catch up academically or refresh mentally.
“Refresh is mainly meant to level the playing field for all of our students [and it’s] especially for students that may not be able to stay after school,” Lee said. “We might not be able to reach every student [because] once 3:34 hits some people have to go, whether it’s work, family life or whatever the reason may be.”
Some of Rose’s freshmen, sophomores and new students have not had the chance to experience Refresh and do not know how the system works, which contributes to the challenge of getting students to sign up on time. Rose teachers and the Refresh committee aim to resolve this challenge by walking students through the steps of signing up, the time schedules and what they may encounter in each Refresh session.
Photo by A'nyia Clemons
“My main responsibility is making sure students have schedules, and most of the time I’m helping students through that endeavor,” Lee said. “We have administrators and members of every teaching department at Rose on our Refresh committee so there is somebody in every section of the school as a member to represent where they’re coming from and to make sure we’re still meeting the needs of the department as well.”
Refresh is very important for the students because it actively allows them to “refresh” their minds during the day. This helps students effectively improve their work ethic and academic stability throughout the day.
Due to COVID-19, with Rose and other schools in the United States having been encouraged to close, Refresh came to an end in March of 2020 and this year will be the first time it is back up and running.
“The biggest challenge with coming back to Refresh this year is that a lot of students haven’t been at school for two years now so getting them back into this structure in general,” Lee said. “It’ll slowly but surely become a second nature once we start getting into it.”
FlexTime Manager, which is the site that students use to sign up for Refresh, has now also developed a new system software because of the frequent bugs that students experienced when going to sign up for Refresh. The software often kicks students out of classes or starts moving significantly slower when a certain capacity of students are on the FlexTime Manager site. The newer system software, with the addition of occasional bugs in the system, has added to student’s confusion about when the right time to sign up will be.
“When we first rolled it out four years ago, we saw some of the similar issues [and] once we have 1600 students trying to use [the site] with the addition of teachers and even other high schools on the same server, that’s when we start to see some issues with the software,” Lee said. “When those issues show up, we have to wait on the software team to go in, correct and re-code it to make sure we don’t experience those issues any longer.”
Social Studies department chair Amity Kea also contributes to the system of Refresh by being the point of contact for system issues. Kea is in constant contact with the FlexTime Manager software company to ensure things are running smoothly.
“As it gets closer to the end of the week we expect all but a handful of students to sign up,” Kea said. “What will happen is things will level out as we move further into the year and dive further into Refresh.”
