Students at Vicksburg and Warren Central high schools will meet every class every day next school year under a change ordered on a 3-2 vote by Vicksburg Warren School District Board of Trustees Thursday night.

Since 1995, both schools had been using a schedule, called a block schedule, where students had longer class periods, but the classes met on alternating days.

Favoring the shift to the seven-period day were District 2 Trustee Zelmarine Murphy, District 3 Trustee Betty Tolliver and District 4 Trustee Jan Daigre.

District 1 Trustee Jerry Boland and District 5 Trustee Tommy Shelton, the newest members of the panel, dissented. Neither expressed an opinion on whether the conversion should occur, but said they voted “nay” because they thought the board needed to get more input.

Several board members said the issue was the most contentious they had faced since the decision to return elementaries to community-based zones. That shift will also occur in the fall.

“I have mixed emotions,” Murphy said.

Murphy said she decided to favor the change because she believes it will encourage class attendance by having students who miss a day not feel like they’ve fallen too far behind. Murphy pointed out that state money allocated to the district is based on average daily attendance.

Boland said he wanted “to take a step back and get us a little bit more time to get input from students and parents.”

“I have yet to be completely convinced that going to a seven-period schedule is going to completely address our attendance and academic issues,” Boland said.

Shelton said all of the parents who contacted him favored the block schedule. He also worried that most parents didn’t know about the proposed changes.

“If I wasn’t on the school board, I don’t think I’d know about it,” Shelton said.

Tolliver took a strong stand for the change.

“A lot of these kids can’t sit for a long period of time,” she said. Under the revision, class periods will be about one hour long instead of two hours.

Tolliver also said students in the lower-quartile of standardized testing would benefit from the repetition and routine of meeting every day.

Daigre did not comment.

Superintendent James Price said the district’s executive staff unanimously supported the change.

“It comes down to what’s going to be the best thing for the largest number of the student population,” Price said, echoing Tolliver.

In a letter to the board, VHS principal Charlie Tolliver supported the seven-period schedule.

“By the time students have been in the same place for such long periods of time, they are exhausted and definitely do not soak up twice as much information as the extended class periods would suggest,” Tolliver wrote.

WCHS principal Mack Douglas wrote that he would support either schedule, but asked the board to make the decision quickly so that a change could be made in time for 2005-2006 school year class assignments.

In other business, the board