Matt Kiernan / The Recorder

The Faculty Senate met on Monday to discuss plans for a hybrid block schedule that would ease existing scheduling conflicts.

“The main thrust is to use classroom space efficiently,” said professor and chairman of the English department Dr. Gilbert Gigliotti.

Freeing time slots that would normally have overlapped each other would now make hundreds of classrooms have availability for use, something that has become a major problem when the university needs to schedule times for rooms.

In the new time block schedule class times will be altered to separate certain class times and with spaces in between so students will have time to walk to their next class.

One of the worries that faculty have is that students won’t have time to walk to their next class because of the decrease in time from 15 minutes to 10 minutes.

“Our aim was to have this ready for spring 2010 but apparently that’s not the case,” said Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs Dr. Joseph Paige.

Having the new time schedule ready by spring of next year is a possibility but more than likely not going to happen until the fall semester of 2010.

With the time given between classes narrowed to ten minutes students could have a problem finding time for outside classroom activities. The time spent talking with friends or asking questions to their professor will be limited since students will have to concentrate on spending their time walking to their next class.

Safety and inconvenience is another issue because the new schedule would move some classes from ending at 9:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. causing some students to get out later. Darkness and the lack of people on campus at such late hours can be dangerous for students walking to their cars.

“We have gotten numerous complaints from teachers education and students who work,” said Paige in regards to the current schedule.

For many students in the School of Education who have three-hour classes two times per week at night, it can cause problemsas they try to schedule themselves to get their general education classes.

“This is something that I asked them to do and what I think they’ve done is extraordinary,” said Provost Carl Lovitt. The proposal to create a new schedule was received mostly by positive reviews from faculty at the senate meeting and some of the faculty thanked Dr. Paige and Susan Petrosino of Registrar for their work on creating the schedule.

Another problem that could arise from the new time block is that many of the classes start and end at odd times such as five after the hour instead of on the hour. Students may have a harder time memorizing their schedules and may have to carry them around longer to remember where and when they have class, although as college students it shouldn’t be as much of a problem.

What faculty would like to see before the schedule is put into effect is overall feedback from the student population on how they’d feel using the new format. Although the faculty will play a major role in how the schedule is to be made, students’ feelings on the subject are going to be considered when putting the plans into place.

Although the senate didn’t vote to enforce the new time schedule, the meeting gave many faculty members  a chance to see the proposed schedule for the first time. The plans for the time blocks was scheduled to be voted on Monday but due to the lack of faculty having had time to view them the vote couldn’t take place.

Currently the new time schedule is the fifth version of the schedule with past forms having been designed without much success. Past versions have included Monday and Thursday or Tuesday and Friday classes but were deemed to be unsuccessful and the newest version looks to be the most reasonable.

The possibility of Friday and Saturday or Saturday and Sunday classes are also being looked at to see if they would work for students.