Juniors and seniors are used to this by now. It’s a few days into the new school year, and so far, we’ve been writing down our assignments in our math notebooks or on spare pieces of paper that we lose by the time we get home. We are more than ready to receive our planners and finally be able to get our lives together.

This year, upperclassmen were faced with a shock that they were not expecting.  Juniors and seniors were told that we would not be provided with a Rocklin High planner. Freshmen and sophomores would receive them, but the upperclassmen were left in the dust. Students were outraged, immediately turning to blame the administration. Turns out, there’s more to the story than what the students may see.

Assistant Principal Whitney Cottrell stated that the administration had been talking about the planner situation for the past few years, due to the fact that teachers felt like students weren’t using them, or students would say they simply don’t need them.

“We wanted to hear from students directly before we made any decision,” Ms. Cottrell states.

Last year, around the end of the school year, Ms. Cottrell sent out a schoology survey regarding the use of planners, in order to garner a percentage of how many students actually put them to use. The focus group was last year’s sophomores and juniors, or this year’s juniors and seniors, and 980 total students completed the survey.

Most of last year’s sophomores and juniors responded to the survey by saying they mainly preferred the schoology calendar or their phones over the school provided planners. Many people question, however, how this survey could represent all of the students, when in reality, less than half of them answered the survey.

“With limited resources in a school, we needed to make sure we were putting those resources where students would use them most,” Ms. Cottrell adds.

Once the upperclassmen found out they would not be getting planners this year, a handful of them went down to the office and requested that they receive one.

“On the survey, one of the questions was ‘if we didn’t provide a planner, would you buy one for approximately $6?’… and that’s really just to cover the cost of the planners… since we were ordering less, the price per planner went up for us, but we were able to make it so we could just charge $5 for the planners, so it’s not to make a profit.”

Ms. Cottrell shared that the administrators made sure they ordered extra just in case students did want to stop by and purchase a planner for themselves.

Since administration had to print significantly less planners than usual, it is evident that they were able to save a lot of money. It is in question, however, what exactly that saved money is going towards.

“We looked at students saying that they would use the schoology calendar or they would use their phones… we were able to purchase additional chromebooks that we are going to put into the classrooms, so we felt that… we could allocate those resources to places where we know that students would [find it more useful].”

All in all, the administration had solid reasons for why they chose to not provide planners for upperclassmen. Granted students found it as an annoyance at first, they now have multiple resources available to them, whether it be a school provide planner, schoology calendar, their phones, or the classic spare piece of paper.