Do CPS Schools Switch Students to IB DP Classes Against Their Requested Schedule?
The sticky August heat clung to the inside of my Honda Civic when my 11th grader, Lila, dropped into the passenger seat and slammed her crumpled schedule on the center console. It smelled like the lemon air freshener I’d picked up at the gas station that morning, and her chipped cobalt nail polish caught the sun as she crossed her arms. “They put me in full IB DP,” she said. “I told my counselor three times I didn’t want full DP. I wanted AP Studio Art, remember? For my portfolio.”
I was confused. We’d submitted her course requests back in May, she’d gotten the confirmation email that said her choices were locked in, and we’d even sat down with her counselor in June to confirm she wasn’t required to do full IB just because she had good grades. Our school lets students pick individual IB classes without committing to the full diploma, which is exactly what Lila wanted: one IB English class, the rest AP and art to leave time for building her college portfolio for art school. So we turned the car off, walked back into the overcrowded high school, and joined the line of other parents and students waiting to fix schedule mistakes.
That’s where I met another mom whose son had done the opposite: he’d requested full IB DP for two years straight, got switched to all AP because the AP sections had extra spots to fill. The line moved so slow, the office AC was broken, and the wobbly box fan in the corner buzzed loud enough that you could barely hear the admins at the front desk. After an hour, we got to talk to a fill-in counselor who wasn’t even Lila’s regular advisor. She shrugged and said it wasn’t a mistake. They had 12 open spots in full IB DP sections after registration closed, so they pulled all the kids who met the 3.5 GPA cutoff, hadn’t requested it, and slotted them in. She called it “balancing sections” to keep staffing.
I left that day annoyed, but started asking around to other CPS parents and an old friend who works as a counselor at a different selective enrollment CPS school, and that’s when I learned this isn’t a rare clerical error. It’s a common, unadvertised practice that happens most years at schools that offer IB DP. CPS funding ties staffing to class size, and IB programs get extra categorical funding that only kicks in if sections hit a minimum enrollment number. If a section of IB DP core classes — Theory of Knowledge, the extended essay seminar, CAS — doesn’t have enough kids signed up, the school can’t keep the section open, and they lose that extra funding entirely. So administrators go through the list of academically eligible students who didn’t request DP, and slot them in to fill the gaps. It’s not personal, and it’s not that your counselor didn’t read your request. It’s a numbers game that gets played behind the scenes after student requests are submitted, before schedules are finalized.
What I learned from that whole messy experience translates to pretty straightforward, doable steps for any CPS parent whose kid has strong preferences about their schedule. First, don’t wait for in-person schedule pick up to check. Log into the CPS Parent Portal and have your student check their student portal 10 to 14 days before the first day of school. Catching a change early gives you time to fix it before the flood of requests hits counselors right before school starts. I didn’t do that that first year, and that’s how we ended up waiting an hour in a hot office with no guarantee of a fix.
Second, when you reach out, don’t only email your student’s counselor. Cc the IB coordinator and your student’s grade-level assistant principal. Counselors get 200+ emails the week before school, and a request with an admin copied almost always gets moved to the top of the pile. Third, save a screenshot of your original course request the second you submit it in the spring. Lila had taken a screenshot of her confirmation page when she turned hers in, and that cut 20 minutes off our back and forth about whether she’d accidentally checked the wrong box. Fourth, if admins say there’s no spot available right away, ask for a written waitlist confirmation and follow up every three days the first week of school. At least 5 to 10 percent of kids drop or change schedules in the first week, when they realize a class is too much or it conflicts with a sport or job, so spots open up all the time.
For us, a kid dropped full IB DP on the 8th day of school to free up time for varsity football, and Lila got her art class swapped in. She missed a week of drawing practice, but she made it up after school for two weeks and got back on track for her portfolio. It’s not always a bad thing, of course: I know a kid from our neighborhood who got switched into full DP against his request, ended up liking the structure, and the diploma helped him get into his top choice engineering school. But for kids who have a specific plan — whether that’s building an art portfolio, taking extra career and technical education classes, or just having enough time for a part-time job they need to help their family — getting pushed into full DP can derail that. Those extra core classes take up a full period every other day, that’s time you can’t get back.
This year, my younger son is heading into 11th grade at the same school. He requested a mix of AP and individual IB classes, no full DP, because he wants room for his robotics team practice and after-school workshops. He submitted his requests back in May, took his screenshot, and we logged into the portal last week to check. Right now, his schedule matches what he asked for. We’re going to check again next week, right before school starts. I know the number balancing still happens, even when schools say they’re working to improve the process. All we can do is catch it early, push for the change, and hope for an open spot. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the one we have, and those small steps make it a lot more likely you’ll end up with the classes your kid actually needs.
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