High school can be a difficult time for any teenager — the fear of not fitting in with peers, staying motivated with hours of homework, figuring out what to do after graduation.

Southside High School is working to complement its students’ academic learning with the lessons of real-life situations.

This year, the school decided to carve out a specific time for an advisory period each day. By taking eight minutes off of each class period and then combining three lunch periods into two, the school sanctioned off about 25 minutes in between first and second periods each day for the advisory time, said Dale Cole, principal at Southside High.

“Overall we felt like we needed to do a much better job of supporting (the students),” he said. “There are other skills that you need outside of grades.”

On Mondays through Thursdays, the advisory period is used for tutoring, club meetings and study hall. But on Fridays, teachers use the time with their advisory groups to go over lessons created by the school counselors, Cole said.

He said everyone uses the same lesson topic, but teachers can tailor it to their particular age group. On Friday the lesson was about anti-bullying, and other topics have included writing resumes, interview skills, good citizenship and suicide prevention.

“We cover all kinds of topics for that,” Cole said. “There’s this perception out there that we’re not preparing students. … There’s always a way to make it better.”

Every teacher is assigned an advisory group or homeroom of about 15 to 20 students and the end goal is to keep a teacher with his or her advisory group until the students graduate, he said.

So far Southside is the only high school in the county to implement this type of program. It’s all in an effort to build relationships between the teachers and students, and thus create a support system for all four years of a student’s high school career.

Brittany Lane, an English teacher and instructional coach at Southside, said she thinks the advisory periods are a good way to look after the students without having to lose instructional time.

Lane has a homeroom/advisory group of 16 freshmen, and she said setting aside time with them each day means she can keep track of their progress and be someone to turn to if they need it.

“It’s time for us as advisors to get to know our advisees better,” Lane said. “Some students don’t have someone checking in on them.”

“There may just not be someone at home that’s looking at grades or even cares about grades unfortunately,” she said.

Teachers also now have the opportunity to teach skills for everyday life and don’t have to try to fit it into the regular academic curriculum, Lane said.

Cole said he hopes that over time the results of this extra support will be better-prepared students and higher graduation rates.

“I think that as we go through the year we’ll get more feedback,” he said. “We’ll continue to tweak it to make it better and better.”

“It’s being utilized a lot by the students, at least by my students that I’m seeing,” Lane said. “All our teachers realize it’s a new program and there’s going to be kinks, but we’ll work them out.”