This coming school year will be the first in many years to contain a third period, if all goes according to plan.

“When I first started teaching at BHS I was very confused that there was no third period,” math teacher Jessica Kellogg said. “As a math teacher it hurts my soul that we go from second to fourth period.”

“In all seriousness, I think that it is strange that it was never replaced after advisory was removed,” she said.

The lack of a third period caused confusion for many freshman this year, including Amanda Wasserman.

“I didn’t understand,” she said. “Why didn’t they just move the numbers around so that they fit the periods?

Freshman Cameron Umpleby agrees.

“It did cause me a lot of confusion,” she said, “the numbers don’t go 1,2,4 they go 1,2,3,4.”

According to technology teacher Craig Alexander, third period has been missing for about nine years. He also said third period used to be a homeroom, then an advisory and then it was completely taken away.

The old student information system, eSIS, was not able to change third period back into a regular-length period after it was an advisory period.

“Supposedly in Infinite Campus, we are allowed to renumber the periods,” Alexander said.

Principal Edward Klein described advisory as a time during which students and faculty had a chance to talk about issues relevant to teens.

“Before I came there was a period of time during the school day that was structured as [an] advisory period,” he said. “And everybody was…given opportunities to talk about issues…for example dating violence.”

According to Klein, BHS staff attempted to fix the problem last summer.

“We tried to fix it last year,” he said, “…but through a series of inputting errors we just weren’t able to get it fixed.”

He went on to say that it is more important to build a master schedule with all the courses in the right places than to have consecutively-numbered periods.

Klein also said that fixing the schedule will not affect the content of the classes or the length of the periods. Therefore, the last period of the day will be tenth.

“When you see your schedule, when it says third period instead of fourth, you’ll know it worked.” Alexander said.