Committee demos School Links four‑year planner and weighs pathway, prerequisite and world-language choices

At the April 14 ANO committee meeting, district staff demonstrated the School Links four‑year planner intended to help students and counselors map course sequences and district pathways (for example, graphic design or entrepreneurship).

Staff showed a test student view with completed and planned courses, credit tallies and pathway clusters. The system currently syncs nightly from Infinite Campus into School Links (one-way); staff said bi-directional scheduling integration is not yet enabled. Members requested back-end counselor access for aggregated planning metrics and asked whether the planner could pre-populate schedules when a student selects a pathway. Staff said some pre-population behavior exists (sequential core courses often autofill) and other pathway‑to‑schedule features remain work-in-progress with the vendor.

Board members raised curriculum policy questions prompted by the planner: whether world language should be recategorized from electives into core requirements given an anticipated state change, how honors/regular options affect student choices, and whether departments should consider collapsing or consolidating low-demand electives. Members emphasized that alternating-year cadences could preserve opportunities while reducing underfilled sections but cautioned about prerequisite and pathway continuity when a course runs only every other year.

Action items and next steps from the discussion included asking department chairs to review program-of-studies entries for outdated or weak course descriptions, preparing year‑over‑year course tables that omit sheltered/placeholder courses for a fair comparison of South vs. Central, and including club/organization links on pathway pages where possible. The committee agreed to make the May meeting a checkpoint for a concluding timeline and the June meeting for course-fulfillment rates.

The committee adjourned at 8:00 p.m.