By Joe Shuron
The Chestnut Hill College administration has agreed to hold off on the plan to increase Friday classes and change common time to Tuesday and Thursday.
After weeks of faculty and administration going back and forth on a myriad of issues including scheduling and dealing out space constraints due to losing Fournier to the OMC campus and the renovations to Sugarloaf for nursing set to come in the fall of 2025, the administration and faculty agreed to pause the plan to install a 13-block schedule for the fall.
Jeffery Carroll, center chair for Data and Society and associate professor of political science, explained: “We needed to do this dance of accommodations. So, what we ended up doing in terms of the pause was just isolating the fall.”
An internal faculty audit found that classes could run in the upcoming fall semester without having to switch to the proposed 13-block schedule.
“All signs point that not only can we meet that capacity, but we can model out to the section of how many extra sections need to be built out into the schedule,” Carroll said.
The originally proposed shift to Monday, Wednesday, and Friday courses was met with questions and confusion from students and professors alike.
Another reason for the addition of Friday classes was to increase students on campus and ideally create more of a vibrant and populated environment on Friday’s. At the moment, there are no plans to increase engaging events for students on Friday to incentivize staying at school.
Freshman accounting major Abigail Galazka said, “I’m happy they are not going to change the schedule for the fall. I would like them to keep the current schedule for the spring but if they showed us a plan and explained how it would be beneficial for us, I wouldn’t mind it.”
Junior business and administration major Shawn Levan said, “I want the schedule to stay the same. I like having Friday’s off.”
For now, the fall schedule will remain the same as the administration and faculty come up with a plan for the 2025 spring semester.
