Sessions of the Basic Operation and Safety class for the laser are continuing at an accelerated pace: 4 sessions in March, 6 in April. I’ll try to keep this up as long as there is demand.

For now we are going to try to stick to a schedule for scheduling new classes. Specifically, new classes will be added once per calendar month, sometime during the last week of the preceding month. Classes might still be added or changed at any time, but most new classes will be posted in a single batch during the last week of the month before they occur. The purpose of this schedule is to limit the number of volunteer hours needed just to maintain the schedule.

I’ve always preferred that the BOS classes be free, because they’re essential to the use of the laser and we do want people to use the laser. However, we’ve found that the number of people who sign up for the free class and then fail to show up is unacceptably high, given the high demand for the BOS class. So for the moment we’re charging a nominal fee of $10 per student, in the hope that this will discourage people from skipping out on a class reservation. If this doesn’t work, we’ll have to resort to drastic measures, like making people pinky-swear that they will show up for class.