The 2+2 A/B cycles were in grades 9-12.
I'm going to speculate that your school is combining the alternate cycles with trimesters because they are concerned that changes in your local public health conditions may interrupt education sufficiently that none of the classes would be completed if they ran year-long. Under the presented plan, one can hope that at least four courses will be completed in one of the trimesters.
I agree that it might not be all it's cracked up to be in the article, but to be fair, components of it have been maintained in a number of schools, generally effectively. I think most schools have gone away from extreme block scheduling, with two to three classes per day now about as far as it goes.
Some of our area high schools use the 4x4 schedule, which was creating problems for state-mandated testing, because half of the students were finishing their course in the fall, but then having to wait until late spring to take the test, while others were having to take the test in the spring when they hadn't finished the whole course. They eventually addressed it for some subjects for the first semester students by arranging for a testing session mid-year, but the second semester students still scramble to finish all the content before testing commences, even though the state has pushed testing into the top of June. And they didn't do anything about the remaining content area testing, which mainly disadvantages second semester students in those content areas, because testing begins as early as March, when they've only had about half of the course.
So yeah, the schedule you have isn't optimal for end-of-course testing that takes place in May. But I think they were probably more worried that students wouldn't get to finish the syllabus prior to testing.
