After much deliberation, presentations, assemblies, and district-wide testing have a new home at Venice with the addition of Advisory—a thirty minute potential solution.

The new period falls just after Period 2, and lasts for 29 minutes. Students attend Advisory four days a week, with the only exception being Tuesdays due to professional development for teachers.

According to principal Yavonka Hairston-Truitt, Venice has been considering adding an Advisory period since before the pandemic, but within the last few years, discussions surrounding the addition became more serious.

“As more responsibilities and needs that students have that go outside the instruction curriculum, the need for it becomes more vivid,” she said. 

Hairston-Truitt said that Venice teachers have voted on Advisory for two years, with the first year being in the 2023-2024 school year, which failed to pass. Venice’s Bell Schedule Committee then surveyed students, parents, and staff for feedback and made adjustments accordingly, specifically that advisories would be both grade and academy specific. Then after the Local School Leadership Counsel (LSLC) approved of the schedule, the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) had a majority vote in favor of the new Advisory schedule at the end of last calendar year.

Assistant principal Richard Valerio is leading Venice’s new Advisory Committee, which consists of 17 other members and meets weekly on Thursdays at 9 a.m.. The committee does not currently have a student representative due to the committee’s meeting time.

Valerio said that the Advisory Committee is a proactive “working committee, not a planning committee.”

“But the planning gets done by the surveys that we give to teachers and the surveys that we’re now giving students,” he said. “And that’s how we’re redefining everything that we’re doing.”

The curriculum for Advisory is divided into four different parts, said Valerio, corresponding to each day of Advisory throughout the week. In addition, school-wide assemblies and testing will also be conducted during the advisory period throughout the school year.

“They wanted to build in time every week where students could connect with their teachers, get personalized support, and work with skills that would help them succeed—not only in school, but in life,” he said.

In the general curriculum, there are social-emotional learning lessons on Mondays, individualized intervention through programs like IXL on Wednesdays, presentations from the counselling team on Thursdays, and then academy specific lessons on Fridays. Wednesdays and Thursdays have more mandatory requirements for teachers and students to follow, whereas Monday and Friday lessons are more personalized depending on how the individual Advisory teacher wants to use the time.

Valerio said that during the first five weeks of school, teachers were not following the curriculum as closely, and that Venice is working on sending more communication with teachers about the expectations for Advisory.

Assistant principal Ernesto Guerrero said that Advisory is more “collaborative in nature.”

“You’re in a non-academic setting, and you get a chance to talk to students and develop relationships,” he said.

Guerrero said that Advisory does not count as a grade, as in accordance with the district’s policy. Instead, students will either pass the class or not. For the first five week grading period, students received a passing grade if they completed both their English and math i-Ready testing diagnostics for the beginning of year assessment.

English teacher Hazel Kight Witham said that Venice has learned that spending the first five weeks on i-Ready testing is not “the most effective and efficient way.”

“We had a bunch of lovely young humans spending the whole time looking at a screen, she said. “That is not what I hoped to be the experience of launching a school year together.

“I think we really learned from that, and I think we know we’re gonna do things differently.”

Kight Witham, who teaches a ninth grade Advisory, said that she hopes to use her Advisory as a space to practice “mindfulness,” as well as introduce her students to the campus and community of Venice.

Despite not having the full curriculum implemented within her Advisory, junior Orla Ordubegian said that she thinks it would be more “rejuvenating” to have more of a focus on getting to know her classmates better.

“I have Advisory with a lot of people I don’t really talk to, so I feel like it’d be cool to see another side of them that’s being pushed into a class that’s not 100% academic,” she said.

Senior Brett Shleton said that he wished one of the days for Advisory could instead be used as a study period for students.

“But I also think it’s really important that it’s just making sure that other things from the school don’t take away from class time,” he said. “I think if they can continue doing that, then I think they’re doing a great job.”

Math teacher Sue Oh said that she has been trying to use Advisory as a way for seniors within the Media Arts and Technology Academy (MATA) to get to know each other before they graduate.

“By the time they graduate, they should all know each other’s names,” she said.

She said that she has not been able to reserve a location where all 100 of the academy’s senior students can meet at the same time. Instead, she had been working with the three other MATA teachers who teach seniors in smaller sessions in order to build more relationships.

According to Oh, these social-emotional learning workshops between students are kind of an “open book.”

“We’re open to anything,” she said. “We asked our students to give us feedback on what they want to go over as well.”

She said that it’s “challenging” to get students interested in wanting to participate in Advisory, “but I understand the importance of getting those things done.”

Although she was “nervous” about Advisory when it was first approved, Oh said that she is now “looking forward to the changes that are to come.”

“I’ve seen an overwhelming number of teachers being super willing to make the best of a change, and try to incorporate different things that we think will be helpful for our students,” she said.