Scheduling

Please reserve 60 – 75 minutes for your initial consultation appointment.

• 30 minutes
• 40 minutes
• 45 minutes
• One hour

Private lessons are a weekly, regularly recurring commitment. Students are entitled to four lessons per calendar month.

(Details about the occasional fifth lesson day of the month are below, in the section titled “First Of Five”.)

The duration of your student’s lesson is determined by availability and subject to Jeff Millis’ discretion. You are welcome to request a different duration at any time; however, schedule changes cannot be guaranteed. The best time to adjust your lesson duration is annually, at the beginning of August.

Occasionally, students may need to miss a scheduled session. Although rescheduling can’t be guaranteed, families are welcome (and usually able) to find a rescheduled time for any missed lesson.

When attempting to reschedule, students and parents are welcome to peruse the lesson calendar for preferred openings. A self-service online scheduler is available for this purpose. Private students and families can find the scheduler directly after logging into jeffmillis.com.

It is not necessary to send a separate message about the cancellation or to ask about rescheduling; once a student or parent cancels their original appointment and optionally reserves a different time, the lesson calendar updates automatically for everyone.

Here is a tutorial for using the scheduler:

IMPORTANT: The online scheduling tool provides a way for students and parents to make one-time, occasional changes to their regular recurring schedule. It is not possible for students and parents to create a new recurring appointment, or permanently change their recurring appointment, with this tool.

NOTE: All rescheduled sessions must take place outside of regularly scheduled lesson times. It is not possible to “reschedule” a student’s lesson to the same appointment during a following week, when a regular lesson is already scheduled.

Once a weekly lesson time has been reserved for a student, permanent changes to that regular schedule cannot be guaranteed.

Annually (in July), families are asked for their scheduling preferences for the coming school year and a new lesson schedule begins each August. This is the best opportunity for all students to make permanent lesson schedule changes.

All lessons must end at their original scheduled ending time, to make sure the remainder of the daily scheduled is not disrupted. Therefore, it is important that students are ready to start their lesson at their scheduled lesson start time.

If a student joins their lesson later than scheduled, the lesson must be shortened to end on time. In this case, the missed partial lesson cannot be made up later.

If a situation arises when the instructor must be late to a lesson, the instructor assumes the responsibility of making sure the time is made up or the lesson is refunded.

Occasionally, a containing five lesson days will occur. When this happens, students always plan to skip the “first of five” lesson days.

For example:

A student who meets on Mondays will occasionally experience a month in which the 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th all fall on Monday.

This student would not expect to have a lesson on the 1st.

In this example, students who have regular lessons on Tuesdays and Wednesdays would not plan to meet on the 1st or 2nd of this month:

Every month (except February, usually) contains two or three “first of five” dates. (In a leap year, February contains one “first of five” date.) This means that most months, a few students take their turn skipping their “first of five”.

This “first of five” system guarantees:

• All students receive four scheduled lessons per month
• Monthly payments stay predictable
• There are a few open days at the beginning of most months. This provides built-in flexible room for rescheduling.

“First of five” dates are equally available to all students who need to reschedule. Preference is given to the first student who requests an opening in the calendar, not to the student who has their regularly scheduled lesson at that time.

The term “irregular date” is used to mean any date in which all lessons are canceled in advance for a special occasion, such as a holiday.

There are several irregular dates occurring during the year:

• Thanksgiving Day (and Black Friday)
• Two weeks encompassing Christmas and the New Year
• Both recital dates in May
• The “last of five” in May (rather than the “first of five”; see the printable calendar at the top of this page for details).

Irregular dates are proactively rescheduled to “first of five” dates according to the 2025-26 Irregular Dates calendar. Students do not skip “first of five” lesson dates that are used to makeup for irregular dates.