Flextime under fire

Over the last few years, Big Spring has been paying a company to run the website Flextimemanager.com to make a website where the students of the school can sign up to stay in a teacher’s room for the 30 minute flex period. The students could also be requested by their teachers to come to their room to finish work they need to finish. Flex time was made for students and teachers in school to have an easier and more efficient way of getting students the help they need from teachers in a more organized way. Although the concept of having a flex time is a good one, and could be beneficial to students, the computer program used to run it, is a problem.

Sometimes during the day, the program will crash out of nowhere. With this happening, almost every other way during the week, this causes a major problem for the students and school where they don’t know if or when it will be working again. One major problem that comes with the program going down is that with the new addition of “catch-all” to Big Spring High School, many students are unable to sign up for a flex by the cut off time. This means that because the students were not able to sign up for a flex before the time deadline due to the program being down, the students automatically get called to catch-all. Catch-all is an addition to flex time this year to help with a few problems that have been occurring from last year. Catch-all was added to prevent students from not going to flexes or eating two lunches during the flex time periods. What happens is that if the student does not sign up for a flex hosted by a teacher by the said deadline, they would be automatically put into catch-all where they will either be said to go to the auditorium or library for that time period because they didn’t sign up anywhere for the flex period. With this happening, many wonder why we pay this company to do and run this program when all that happens a good bit of the time is the program not working correctly or being down, as it seems to be a waste of money with what is done. 

Many believe that we should go back to using a Google sheet to run flex as the program never went down and were reliable in getting the students where they need to be on time and efficiently. Some people say that we contact the company that runs flex time manager and have them take down the website for a little bit to give them time to find and fix all the problems that are currently affecting the program. During the time of the site being down the school can use the Google sheets as a placeholder until the program is fixed or hopefully fixed well enough that the website doesn’t crash so often. If the time is taken to do this it might give them the time to make the website as good as it should be or even better. Only time will tell if any of these problems can be fixed and if they can or will be fixed.