This year, Skyline High School has switched Flextime signup applications from the previous Enriching Students to Student Support Time. This is the third application since Flextime began back in 2019.
The decision to change the software came when budget cuts were announced by the Issaquah School District.
“…the district said they weren’t going to pay for it [Enriching Students] anymore,” Mari O’Neil, the school data processor, said. With enrollment rates dropping, the Issaquah School District was forced to make budget cuts of 11.38 million dollars in the 2022-23 school year. “…the schools had to pay for their own [software].”
Many students were pleased with the decision to switch Flextime applications. Students reported that the previous app was plagued with issues.
“I had to login every single time, because I used the mobile app,” Connor Braun, senior, said. “That thing [Enriching Students] just didn’t remember any info and it was hard to figure everything out.”
Problems with Enriching Students were consistent across each classroom.
“…you’d just have this line of people up by the teacher, and the teacher would have to schedule every single person,” Raghav Pradhan, senior, said. “And that was big, because that is literally the only function of the app, is to schedule people for flextime, so people not being able to get into their account as a whole, is a giant problem.”
Enriching Students operated as an independent application, that needed to be downloaded from the app store or opened in a web browser. The software was slow, with many sign-in issues.
It became an issue every Tuesday and Wednesday, where students forgot to sign up for a Flextime session and were then locked out and unable to do so. Student Support Time aims to fix the sign in issue, with the application being run without an external app.
The new Student Support Time runs through ClassLink, a program that the ISD was already familiar with. Many district-owned resources and applications can all be viewed in a single place, including Student Support Time.
Students can log into ClassLink, select Student Support Time, and sign up for any of their current teachers to spend their Flex period. That raises an issue with the new application. With Enriching Students, students could sign up for any teacher listed in the school. Now with Student Support Time, students’ only options are for classes currently enrolled.
“Right now, I had to ask my extended essay advisor, Ms. Peterson, to schedule me into her class because I don’t currently have her as a teacher right now, even though I do need to schedule Flextimes with her on a regular basis,” Raghav said. “…it would be nice to have that kind of freedom.”
Although there are still minor issues with the Flextime sign-up process, the new Student Support Time software resolved many of the issues faced in previous years. “There is no perfect flextime app,” Ms. O’Neil said. “It’s the best one we found so far, and I looked at a lot of them last year.”
