Normally, during finals week, students can be seen walking around downtown Carmel to relax or entering the school in order to ask last-minute questions before their final exams. However, due to COVID-19 and the new finals schedule, you won’t find students doing these activities this year. 

To help with contact tracing and to slow the spread of the virus, students are not allowed to leave the school building even if they don’t have a final during one of their periods. Due to the large number of people entering the school last year, office hours will not be available. With this and the final exams schedule decreasing the amount of students and staff come into contact with, the HiLite staff would like to commend the district’s efforts and hard work in creating this.

The Carmel Cohort will run on the following schedule for finals week: Virtual study day on Dec.14; in-person Gold day finals on Dec. 15; virtual study day on Dec. 16 and an “Orange day” on Dec. 17. An “Orange” day is a virtual day where no final exams will take place and individual teachers will determine assignments. 

According to Assistant Principal Toby Steele, it is up to the teachers to determine final assessments.

Steele said, “Teachers still have the authority and the autonomy to create their final assessment in the way they want. There should be no difference in terms of that conducive environment that students should have to take their final assessment. If anything, it would probably be better because of the smaller environment.”

Furthermore, the Greyhound cohort schedule is as follows: A regular in-person day on Dec. 14; virtual study day on Dec. 15; in-person Gold day finals on Dec. 16; virtual study day on Dec. 17 and an in-person blue day finals on Dec. 18. The greyhound cohort will not have an “orange” day. Additionally, virtual students will take all exams at home. 

According to Steele, this plan was put in place out of the need for social distancing. 

Steele said, “Socially distant classrooms was not something we were willing to budge on, given the current climate with COVID-19. We still need to maintain socially distant classrooms during the final exam. So to bring all students back into the building was not an answer. Working with our current framework with the hybrid setting, our plan was built around the necessity for social distancing.” 

The HiLite staff would like to commend the administration of their efforts and hard work in creating this. We understand that this was a lot of work and appreciate them in making student and staff’s health a priority.

See this link for the finals schedule.