Tippecanoe Valley High School Principal Chad Cripe explains a new class schedule to the school board Monday night, March 12.

AKRON — Students returning to Tippecanoe Valley High School this fall will see a new class schedule.

The Tippecanoe Valley School Corporation’s Board of Trustees approved a new schedule presented by Principal Chad Cripe at the board’s regular meeting Monday night, March 12.

The revised schedule includes a total of seven periods, counting lunch and two study periods also known as PLC or SRT, Viking Success or RTI, Return to Instruction.

“This schedule gives us flexibility,” said Cripe. “We’re going to start 10 minutes early. We’re going to go from three lunches down to two lunches.” Cripe added that the lunch periods will be expanded from 25 minutes to a half hour. Times between periods will be reduced by one minute.

“By eliminating a lunch, we gained some time,” Cripe said, “There’s really no reason why you can’t get from anywhere in the building in four minutes.”

Another gain for education was a minute of class time. “We’re feeling really good about our schedule,” Cripe said. “We worked this through all the teachers.”

The times spent in each class, according to Cripe, increases from 44 minutes to 45. School will start at Tippecanoe Valley High School next school year at 8:15 a.m. instead of 8:25 a.m. Cripe said most students who are bussed in are already in the school by 8:15 a.m. “The people who it will affect are the people who drive, they’re going to have to get here 10 minutes earlier,” he said.

In other business, Cripe told the board that the high school’s remediation techniques designed to prepare students for ISTEP testing are proving effective.

“We asked ourselves, ‘how can we use data?’” he said. “We had to find a way to not only prepare our freshmen and sophomores who were lagging behind in skills to be able to take the ISTEP test this year, we also focused on our juniors who needed to re-take the test, We were able to do that by looking at their [juniors] ISTEP data and our freshman and sophomores by looking at their NWEA scores.”

Cripe said math mediation groups meet every Monday and Wednesday and English language arts groups meet on Tuesdays and Fridays and in small groups on Thursdays.

Cripe told the board that 74.14 percent of Valley students passed the ISTEP 10 test in English language arts, which is higher than the state average of 60.5 percent.

In math, Cripe reported junior retakes showed passing grades also higher than the state average and in both subject areas, students throughout the school showed encouraging growth.