Course Awareness Week updated amid districtwide decision to remove course change requests

Naperville Central is implementing several new changes to the 2026-27 course selection process, extending Course Awareness Week activities and employing senior student leaders to provide support to underclassmen during Advisory on Tuesday, Nov. 10. These school-level additions will join a districtwide policy change in which high school students will no longer be able to request course changes past the final confirmation meeting with their counselor.

Announced in a Talk203 email sent to district families on Oct. 30, the new policy is aimed to minimize the reorganization of student schedules and staff rosters following final counselor meetings.

“What a lot of people don’t understand is the process that we go through once the course selection process is complete at the end of January,” said Steve Jeretina, Assistant Principal of Curriculum and Instruction. “There’s been an opportunity for students to make revisions to their schedule, [which moved] students into areas that we didn’t necessarily plan for. So that’s why you might see a discrepancy of one class that has 30 students and another one that might have 14, whereas before [course changes] it might have been a little bit more balanced.”

With the exception of incompletion of a required prerequisite course, this policy will apply to all courses for students at Central and Naperville North. Separately, Central administration has redesigned and extended Course Awareness Week to take place across multiple weeks from Nov. 9 to Nov. 20.

“Our Assistant Principal for Student Services and I partnered very closely in working with our counselors, department chairs and other leaders in the building to take a deep look at the process and try to figure out what was the cause of all these changes,” Jeretina said. “If we’ve got more than 1000 requests to change courses in the summertime, there’s something that we’re not doing and there’s something that’s not sticking.”

Counselor Kimberly Kopec cited that Central often receives roughly 13-1600 course change requests annually among its over 2400 students. According to Jeretina, from July 2026 to the end of October, over 1,150 course change requests were submitted by students across all grades.

On Nov. 10, an Elective Course Fair will be held in the auxiliary gym during lunch periods for students to interact with elective teachers and discuss courses. Additionally, on Nov. 17 and 19, counselors will be answering student questions in the Postsecondary Advisory Resource Center (PARC) during lunch hours. Students can also sign up for SOAR in the auditorium on Nov. 19 for a Q&A with their counselors and department chairs.

“[We’re going to be] talking a little bit more about pathways [and] endorsement areas, with the aim of having students make more informed choices now so that they feel comfortable in the long term and for what they plan on taking next year,” Jeretina said. “We’re trying to be much more intentional about a one-on-one conversation between a student and their core area [teachers] about the next courses and sequences.”

These extended Course Awareness Week activities come with the addition of roughly 60 Senior student leaders who will visit Nov. 10’s Advisory classes to discuss course selection with younger students. The student leaders met during Nov. 5’s SOAR with Assistant Principal of Student Services Merigan Neben to delegate advisory locations and review potential responses to peer questions.

“We know that it’s important to include peers talking to other peers about the classes that they’ve [taken], the things that they’ve learned from those classes and how [they’ve] benefited [from] them,” Kopec said. “When we’re sitting one-on-one with [students] in the office and talking about classes, it can feel a little flat because we’re just talking about what we know of those classes. But when [students] hear directly from a student, we know there’s a greater impact.”

Student leaders will only be assigned to Advisories without seniors, with the expectation that students in senior-second hours will be able to discuss course selection amongst themselves and give each other advice. On Nov. 17, counselors will visit Advisory classes and non-senior students are expected to begin inputting their course selections into Schoolinks.

While students can no longer make course change requests, the relative deadlines to meet with counselors and make their final selections remain the same. Current sophomores are set to finalize their classes first in early December, and current freshmen, juniors and incoming freshmen follow with January deadlines.

For a complete list of Course Awareness Week events and course selection deadlines, view this graphic available in Central’s November Newsletter.

“[We want students] owning the choices that they’re making and choosing classes that are intentional for them,” Kopec said. “As a counselor, I like to always say, you have to go into course selection with blinders on. You want to be focused on you and you alone. If you’re taking classes with those little blinders up, your path is going to be very unique, and your schedule is uniquely going to be built around the choices that you made intentionally.”

The extension of Course Awareness Week, student leaders and addition of extra lunch and SOAR events are the first major changes to occur to the course awareness process in at least five years.

“We were working [on this] from February through May, so we’re excited to see how this helps students,” Jeretina said. “We’re confident that [the Course Awareness Weeks are] going to provide them the information that they need, but we’ll probably be reaching out to students after course selection ends in January to get their feedback on it.”

Course Awareness Week updated amid districtwide decision to remove course change requests

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