Split Enrollment is a mess. On an average day of school, I’ll miss the last 10 minutes of my second hour at Pioneer and I’ll be 20 minutes late to my next class at Community. It’s a stressful, hectic experience, but I love it anyway as it’s the only way I can experience Community classes while not being enrolled full time.

Without split enrollment, I wouldn’t be able to enroll in classes like Journalism or the History of the 1960s and for that I am forever grateful, but I would be lying if I said that it didn’t come with its sacrifices.

Making one schedule with the classes from two different schools is insanely difficult and it only gets harder once you realize that you won’t be able to do half of the classes because they’re either full, start at conflicting times or they aren’t offered the specific hour you need them. These are all problems I’ve run into while trying to juggle two schools at once, but I’ve managed to work around them with the help of teachers and certain counselors.

Split-enrollment isn’t just hard in practice; most of the struggle actually comes from trying to get the classes you want. At 8:00 a.m. on Monday, Aug. 21 —the earliest time one can register for split-enrollment — I walked into my counselor’s office ready to get the classes I had been planning around for the last two weeks. One hour later, I walked out with two Pioneer classes, two Community classes, one online class and one free period that would hopefully be filled at a later date. This is the last thing I wanted and I still don’t really know how it happened or how my counselor let me leave his office with that schedule.

Over the next two weeks through a series of emails, phone calls and meetings, my schedule would go through five different iterations until I finally ended up with the one I have now being four Pioneer classes and two Community classes. It got to the point where my counselor decided that he couldn’t be bothered to help me anymore and he told me that I would have to talk to the administration to fix my schedule. So I did.

About halfway through the first week of school, my schedule was finally settled, but that didn’t take away from the insane amount of stress I had to deal with not knowing if I would get the classes that I wanted or, more importantly, needed. Thankfully there were people who were not only willing to help but wanted to help me.

If split-enrollment didn’t exist, I would’ve just had six classes at Pioneer. I’d have saved myself a whole lot of stress, but I then wouldn’t be able to take classes at Community. I wouldn’t be able to take Ryan’s 1960s class and I wouldn’t be able to write this article for the Communicator.

Even with all of its ups and downs, I’m still incredibly thankful for split-enrollment and I will happily continue to do it for the rest of my high school career.