Students at Camas High School (CHS) are confused and frustrated at the lack of support staff provided for forecasting this year. Freshmen in particular were thrown into the deep end as far as putting course codes into Skyward for next year.

“I did not get much help at all from teachers especially. Only one of my teachers mentioned forecasting and went over it for only one class,” said CHS freshman Keeret Sethi.

Teachers at CHS during the beginning of the year were supplied with a slideshow of all the different things students had to complete in order to achieve their Advisory credit. But these informational slides failed to mention how to access the area in Skyward where students request their classes or how to put the classes students want into Skyward using the course code.

They also did not have a link to what classes are available through the 2022-23 course guide.

“It was a bit of a difficult process to decide the classes that would be best for me since not many resources were given. Due to the lack of resources available and the confusion on the Skyward format, it wasn’t a good experience,” said Sethi.

At CHS, counselors are the ones in charge of forecasting and organizing everything students need to complete before they graduate. However, they are not in charge of leading students through the process of adding classes to Skyward.

After a slight change CHS made to advisory itself, the counselors noticed that one of the main differences between what the process looked like last year and this year was the amount of time students had to forecast.

“The first week we had for forecasting we had a late start because of snow so that advisory was canceled. And then the next advisory we were supposed to have we had early release so that advisory session was canceled. So in the past we had more time for forecasting and then this year; it really came down to pretty much one advisory,” said CHS counselor Miranda Lincoln.

Last year, forecasting started about two weeks before the deadline for class registration hit, which gave students plenty of time to decide what classes they wanted to take.

This year, because of things beyond CHS’s control, the forecasting process was immensely impacted.

So really, despite the added complications, the forecasting process has not changed much at all from last year.

The main difference is the amount of time students had for forecasting this year. Staff opted to do what they do every year and they did the best they could with what they were given.

For freshmen that did not know what they were doing, they did very well to try and figure out the process for forecasting as well as receiving help from many upperclassmen that have been through the process multiple times and are confident in they’re forecasting skills.