The five-minute scramble between class periods at sprawling Glen Burnie High School leaves little time to socialize or even make a pit stop at lockers or the restroom.
And some students have to make this mad dash between as many as six buildings in a day on the 373,000-square-foot campus.
"When classes change in our high schools, it's complete chaos, like an airport terminal," said Alex Szachnowicz, facilities director for Anne Arundel County schools. "Students don't have time to talk to their teachers or talk to each other [and] build relationships."
Bolstered by emerging research that suggests smaller schools boost academic performance, improve graduation rates and curb truancy and other disruptive behavior, Anne Arundel County school officials are considering ways to make high schools feel smaller.
It's the district's first comprehensive look at high school design since the mid-1970s.
In the future, Anne Arundel high schools will have students organized in buildings according to grade, so freshmen will find all their classes in the same hallway or section of the school and will be taught by a familiar team of teachers.
Most of the district's 12 high schools have already started to do this through "freshmen academies" to ease their transition, but under the new design, sophomores, juniors and seniors will also benefit from a tighter-knit approach to education.
Currently, high school campuses are configured by subject, so that all the math classes are in one hall, all the social studies in another, and so on. Rearranging high schools to keep common groups of students together by grade level will help students build closer relationships with teachers and each other, Szachnowicz told school board members at a meeting Wednesday.
In this new vision, main offices - cloistered spaces at the entrance of a school that sometimes intimidate students and parents - will also be less centralized, with administrators and guidance counselors sprinkled throughout the school, so students feel more comfortable approaching them for help, he said. High schools will also be less reliant on computer labs because they'll be wireless, allowing more students to use computers in their classrooms.
"We're moving to a home, community-type concept," Szachnowicz told school board members. "We're trying to find ways to break down these 200,000-square-feet high schools to make them feel smaller."
