New Changes to Lee’s Summit North

Story & Photo by Abby Langle – Editor-in-Chief

It has been a while since Lee’s Summit North has seen a normal school year, whatever that might mean. No one except for this year’s seniors has known what LSN is like during a “normal” year. However, this year, that is changing as the school is going back to a schedule that more resembles the one it had pre-Covid along with a Bronco Time that is different from last year’s. 

   This year students are being reintroduced to “block scheduling”. Block scheduling is a unique form of scheduling where two days a week LSN will only hold half of the classes on a student’s schedule, however, each class will be about an hour and a half instead of the normal 47 minutes. This allows teachers to have one day a week they can utilize for longer lessons, activities, and tests. 

   “The staff voted last school year on what kind of schedule they wanted and the majority was for blocks,” Sarah Graff, assistant principal, said. 

   As the schedule is moving back to the way it was pre-pandemic, so are other things in the school, including Bronco Time. Before the world shut down Bronco Time was a time in the day when students could go wherever they wanted in the school and hang out with friends, get help from teachers, or make up any quizzes or tests. The year after covid, there was no Bronco Time due to the constantly changing schedule. Last year things changed and Bronco Time resumed but was quite different. It was held in mentor rooms and students could only leave to go to another teacher if they had a pass from that teacher ahead of time and something they needed to work on in that room. This year students will now have more freedom, and while they still need a pass to go to another room, they can choose where they want to go and will not need to get it from the teacher ahead of time.

   “Students are now allowed to leave Bronco Time with a pass, whereas before they had to stay in their mentor room the whole time. But there are no open spaces where they can go, their destination will always have to be to a teacher,” Graff said. 

   Another change students may have noticed this year is that their lunch shifts feel a little bigger than they used to. This is because there are only three lunch shifts this year instead of previous years where there were four. 

   “Timing wise we wanted to have more equitable hours, so fifth-hour use to be really long and that was because there was four lunch shifts so now that there are three lunch shifts, fifth-hour can be the same length as the other classes,” Graff said.

   One of the last, and biggest, changes for students and staff alike this year includes all the new faces as well as old ones that are not around anymore. Last year LSN said goodbye to a lot of faculty but this year they welcomed many new members to the Bronco family. This included teachers and administrators alike.

   “I believe there are 26 [new teachers], there are two new assistant principals and then our principal is new to his role, although he has been a principal for several years,” Graff said.

   While new changes can be overwhelming at times, especially when there are so many, they can also bring a sense of excitement and opportunity to a school community. That being said it is clearly an exciting time to be a Bronco.