With students pushing through the halls of Wayland High School (WHS) and scrambling to get to their upcoming classes, it takes just a single swipe on a phone to be guided to the correct classroom. As physical scheduling devices begin to phase out, a new era of digital organizing is welcomed in by students at WHS, with a variety of platforms used by the student body. One of these tools is a third party app called Saturn.

Saturn is a popular scheduling app that guides students at WHS and around the country to their classes daily. By manually plugging your schedule into the app after selecting your school, Saturn shows you what time your classes start and end based on the letter day schedule from A to H, as well as which other students are in your classes.

In a survey completed by WHS students, 65% reported that they use Saturn to access their schedule, and 40.1% reported that they use the app everyday.

With such a large portion of the student body using this platform, there are considerable benefits and drawbacks to the functions of the app, prompting the question, does Saturn cause more harm than good?

PROS

In some ways, Saturn can be more efficient than rival scheduling platforms, such as PowerSchool. Saturn can provide easy access to everyday schedules and be adjusted on days when the schedule is different than usual, such as “Super Wednesdays” or Extended Advisories, which occur often at WHS.

“I use Saturn multiple times a day,” senior Sophia Nguyen said. “I probably check it once every block and also a couple times in the morning to see what school supplies I need to bring to school.”

One important benefit of Saturn is its utility at the beginning of a new school year, as it allows students to quickly grasp their new schedules, as well as view who will be in their classes.

Unlike Saturn, PowerSchool is not a social app. It solely contains information about an individual’s academics, while Saturn allows for friend requests, chatting, and showing users other students in their classes. This could potentially be a contributing factor to why Saturn is a more popular scheduling app among students than PowerSchool.

“At the start of the year, [Saturn] helped me a lot when I didn’t know my schedule yet,” freshman Ivy Robertson said. “I think it’s nice, the flexibility of it, how you can easily change what classes you’re going to.”

PowerSchool is used primarily to access grades and attendance. Like Saturn, it contains student schedules and allows for individuals to view them; however, the app also contains numerous different tabs, including grades and attendance, student reports, teacher comments and more.

The abundance of tabs can lead to navigation struggles for students, making it a less popular option for schedule viewing than Saturn.

“I think getting to the Powerschool schedule is super clunky,” Nguyen said. “The process of viewing schedules on PowerSchool takes five times longer to access [than Saturn].”

The reluctance to use PowerSchool over Saturn has caught the attention of principal Allyson Mizoguchi, who recognizes that PowerSchool’s abundance of information can make navigating schedules more challenging.

“We would like our school information system to be as helpful to students and families as possible in the app form,” Mizoguchi said. “It’d be good to get input from students about why they’re not using, or maybe not choosing to use [PowerSchool] over something like Saturn.”

In addition to difficulties finding schedules, there are other faults within the PowerSchool app that may contribute to students choosing to use Saturn as an alternative. When a student has a free block, it shows up as a blank spot on the PowerSchool app, which may lead to confusion on where someone is supposed to go. PowerSchool also doesn’t show lunch blocks.

“If I have a free, [PowerSchool] just doesn’t show the block there,” freshman Connor Cavanaugh said. “Sometimes, that confuses me.”

Saturn also makes navigation easier through timers that count down to the beginning and end of each class as well as passing periods. This allows students to easily grasp when their classes start and finish, as well as how long they have to get from class to class.

CONS

Some may argue that an app used to view student schedules should not have social features like Saturn does. Anyone whose friend request is accepted by another student on Saturn has access to their schedule and their location during the school day. Social media platforms such as SnapChat, TikTok and Instagram can be linked to Saturn accounts as well.

In June 2025, Snap Inc., Snapchat’s parent company, acquired Saturn. This may raise concerns, as Snapchat is an entirely social app popular among high school students.

According to an article by Education Week, Saturn does not monitor messaging between users, leaving it up to students who use the app to report any unsuitable content. This could pose potential danger risks to students, especially as the majority of students at WHS are under the age of 18.

Furthermore, Saturn does not always give students the correct schedule. Occasionally, class blocks can be mixed up in the app, possibly causing students to be late to their classes or take the wrong lunch.

“[I use both PowerSchool and Saturn] because Saturn gives you the time that classes end, but PowerSchool is correct,” freshman Laura Marrone said. “Saturn is not always correct.”

Additionally, Saturn is not officially partnered with WHS, making it a third party platform. About 23.4% of students who filled out a survey said that they believe the app is edited by WHS administration, which is untrue. This misinformation could lead to students putting more trust in the app than they would have knowing the app was not affiliated with WHS.

“Sometimes we have apps or companies that we know we’re bringing into the school because they’re offering some sort of service or some sort of way of learning to our students,” WHS principal Allyson Mizoguchi said. “They sign a privacy agreement, which basically means they agree to keep our student data private. And this company has not done that. We’re not officially partnering with them in any way.”

According to head of technology Marc Lefebvre, companies partnering with WHS sign a contract stating that they will not share student data to third parties. There are also data retention policies put in place, ensuring that these companies delete any collected data after students graduate or after a certain number of days has passed. Saturn has not signed any of these agreements, meaning students could be subject to third party information leakage.

“One of the sort of domains of responsibility that I have is making sure that our software protects student data privacy,” Lefebvre said. “We do not have a data privacy agreement with Saturn.”

However, Lefebvre also recognizes that there is a very low chance of anything going wrong in terms of student data.

Although the Saturn app does have some downsides, especially considering it is a third-party app, it can be a quick, efficient way for students to access their schedules in a way that PowerSchool does not offer.

“You always weigh sort of risk versus impact,” Lefebvre said. “What’s the risk of anything going wrong? It’s probably kind of low, but the impact of your data suddenly being hacked or flooded out into the market is more significant.”