NORWICH – More Norwich High School students will be enrolled in academic courses next year and fewer in study halls if the building principal has his way.

Dr. Robert Cleveland, the high school’s interim principal, discussed the progress he and his staff have made since September in combating what he called “an excessive number of kids in study hall.”

“I feel very, very good about the direction that we’re going,” the administrator said. “I think it’s the right direction.”

According to Cleveland, approximately 1,100 students have study hall every day, which equates to 1 1/2 to 2 per student, per day.

Their approach to rectifying the problem has been two-fold. First, the administrator has issued an “edict” limiting the number of study halls a student can have in his or her schedule.

“We’re not going to allow any kid to schedule more than one study hall on a daily basis,” Cleveland said.

At the same time, the high school is in the process of developing several new elective offerings to fill the scheduling gaps. First presented to the board in November, these courses include classes on the Modern Middle East, classical guitar, forensics, civil engineering, statistics and an SAT prep class. While full curriculums have not yet been created for all of these classes, they are already listed in the course catalog.

“We’ve attracted a significant number of kids to those electives,” Cleveland said. According to his figures, 183 students had signed up for one of more of the new course offerings. While the administrator said he would have been happy if at least five of the 10 new classes attracted students, each offering has attracted at least eight students. Several, he reported, had roughly 30 students sign up, with one course attracting 42.

The interest in these new electives alone reduces the number of study halls per day by approximately 400, much closer to the one per day Cleveland has deemed acceptable.

The next step will be seeing which classes “fit” for scheduling purposes.

“We’ve spent a good deal of time with the master schedule trying to eliminate as many of the foreseeable conflicts as we possibly could,” Cleveland explained. A first run of the schedule yielded a roughly 66 percent no-conflict rate. His goal, he said, was to get it within the 80 to 90 percent range.