Oakdale High School has now just entered the 2023/2024 school year. This is the second year in a row where the administrative team has stayed the same, which hasn’t happened since Oakdale opened in 2010. Recently, Oakdale has experienced a rapid population growth, which required some new changes to be made. But what are these new changes?
Since Oakdale is expected to grow to 1,700 students by the end of this year. Admin realized there was not enough room in the school for all the students. Principal Caufield comments, “We definitely did some construction in the building. First of all, Mr. Schlee used to have one giant room in A149, so we split it into 2 smaller rooms. Now Mr. Ranallo and Mr. Schlee both have their own separate rooms down there.”
The school added additional counselor offices, as well as nine and a half new teachers around the building, to give students an appropriate amount of opportunities. Caulfield adds on, “We’ve got a lot of ‘floaters’ around, mostly teachers who volunteered to have a cart and move rooms around the school. We’ve got teachers sharing and switching around classrooms.”
In addition to the added rooms and teachers, there have been some changes with SET at Oakdale. Teachers this year are more focused on having SET be a learning and tutoring block, rather than student’s using it as a free block to use their phones. Caulfield shares, “We’re committed to not having phones during SET, meaning more academic time.” SET movement has also changed. Students will go straight to the classroom they got pulled to after the second block, rather than like last year, where students would have a 10 minute ‘moving’ period after SET starts.
Another change we’re seeing is with clubs, where clubs are happening at different times during the school day. They happen during different blocks, SET, and after school, whereas last school year it was only during SET and occasionally after school. Counselor Tara Ketteringham believes, “I think it’s nice that clubs are changing and not just in SET, that made it hard for kids to do all sorts of different clubs, so I think the change in that will be really helpful.”
There was a club fair on the 28-30 of August for students to look at what clubs Oakdale has to offer, and sign up. Having clubs spread out more will allow more students to have time to participate in them, which encourages more socialization from the students at Oakdale.
Changes will continue to be made at school, as Caulfield quotes, “We are always trying to be better so that is what drives us.” As our school continues to grow, more changes will have to be put in place.
Ketteringham agrees, “These changes are definitely related to growth, and how much our student population is growing and changing. We have to adapt.” If a school has a growing population, but we are not making more space for students, the building will become overcrowded, which influences what changes must be made.
A big part of why we’re noticing so many changes this year is because it’s Caufield’s second year at Oakdale. He states, “As a first year principal, I didn’t want to change a lot, so I was just kind of watching and seeing what was going on. Really year 1 is about listening and seeing what’s going on, year 2 is about executing some of those changes.”
Overall, we are noticing many new changes happening this school year. SET movement will be before the 30 minute block, clubs will be held at more times during the day, SET will be used as more of a tutoring time than free time, and Oakdale is continuing to do construction around the building. As a constantly growing community, we must adapt to changes and make our own changes. We are off to a great start in the 2023-2024 school year!
