Strategic Scheduling: The New Advantage for Academic Leaders

Hello and welcome everyone to another Atlas webinar.

Today, we are really thrilled to have Sahil, co-founder of ScheduleX, with us.

As you know, Atlas is a nonprofit organization, so we rely on the support of our vendor partners to not only provide great thought leadership but support all the work that we do.

So we're very grateful for their partnership.

And if you have any further questions after this webinar, you'll also be able to meet Sahil in person at the annual conference in Columbus.

So without further ado, I'm going to pass things over to Sahil to talk about strategic scheduling, the new advantage for academic leaders.

Thank you so much for the introduction, Kelsey, and hi, everybody.

Great to see you.

I'm looking forward to meeting a lot of you at the Atlas conference in a few weeks.

And let's get started.

I'm going to just share my screen and let me know when you can see it.

Good to go.

Good to go.

Perfect.

Thank you.

So today I'm going to tell you three stories.

I'm going to talk about three schools.

No big deal, just three schools.

That's what I'm going to do.

The first school is a large school.

We have a high school in Maryland.

They have a big enrollment.

The second one is a medium-sized school, and the school size being subjective, but it's a medium-sized school.

We have a school in Georgia, 500 to 600 students.

And the third one is a school in North Carolina.

And if we have time, I'll show you a school in Massachusetts, a middle and high school with a smaller enrollment.

And I'm going to tell you about these three.

So let's start with the school in Maryland.

Now, as you can see, it's a high school.

It's a big enrollment.

They have 1,200 students.

And from a scheduling perspective, they have a team of two to three people that spend pretty much six to eight weeks in the summer doing scheduling by hand.

Right? So as you can imagine, that's a significant investment of time and effort.

It takes a while to get scheduled going, and a lot of resources go into the scheduling process.

So when we started working with that school, and over here I have anonymized all of the information, so you will not be able to infer who or what I'm talking about.

But when we started working with the school, the school wanted to just institutionalize the process, right? They have three people spending so much time on this, and they don't really know.

Scheduling was a black box.

And when we started working with them, what I'm showing you is the story of how the engagement developed with them and what we learned from that.

So this is a schedule that we gave them.

We actually gave them, as you can see, 16 options to pick from.

So the bottom three are anonymized, that I have anonymized, but we gave them 16 options to pick from.

Now, certainly 16 is too many.

Nobody needs 16.

Probably five is good enough.

But one of the first things that was different is that because scheduling was such a long and painful process, it was such an excruciating process, you only have one schedule at the end of it, and frankly, it's take it or leave it.

That can change.

You now have options that you can pick from.

So when we gave them the first option, this was about, as you can see, right, some 93, 94% fulfillment.

And we did the whole thing.

We got the data from the school.

They had excellent data hygiene.

Here you can see that I've anonymized the students, but you can see any student sample schedule where they requested courses.

We assigned them different courses.

We did the same thing for teachers.

We did the same thing for rooms.

And the scheduling process was done.

And that's when it became interesting.

So one of the things that we had heard from the team in different bits and pieces, and the senior administration was operating on as an assumption, is that we don't have adequate rooms.

So this was something that had been accepted as a truth in the school, right? That we don't have enough rooms.

We're constrained on rooms.

So when we gave them the schedule, naturally, we also gave them the rooms, right? So as you can see, you could go to different rooms over here, and you can see how they're utilized, what courses are happening.

And this is where the first breakthrough happened, where one of the questions we got as we gave them the first option is that, "Hey, why are some rooms underutilized?" Because we weren't aware that they had a rooms issue.

We just solved it.

And when they asked us that, "Hey, we have a rooms issue.

Why is room 14, for example, only being used 50% of the time?" And there were a bunch of rooms, and a lot of them were not at very high utilization, right? And to which our response was, "Well, you have excess capacity.

You have excess capacity.

You can offer another elective.

You can offer another course.

You have the space." I can show you the utilization for every single room, and we have the space right here.

So this was the first big breakthrough.

The administration was working on the assumption this is not true.

But here we saw that there is space in the rooms, because if you optimally utilize them, you get the space out.

This was one of the things.

We made this assumption or tested this even more strongly.

So I want you to check this out.

This is 61 rooms right here.

Right? When we give them the schedule, it has 61 rooms.

We did the second iteration of this where we had just one room.

So the room was just a placeholder.

Let's just say we got rid of the rooms.

That's really what we did.

And you'll see that the percentage has not really changed a lot.

It was 94%, 95%.

Now it's 95.8%.

In a school with 1,200 students, 17,000 course requests, that is statistically insignificant.

That's a very, very small change when you get rid of the rooms versus you have them.

So it was a huge unlock for the school, and the school completely different assumption for the admin that, "Hey, we may or may not have a rooms policy."Or we may or may not have a shortage of rooms.

As we continued our work with them, the other thing that came up is, so check this out.

When you have a schedule with, say, 95% fulfillment, whatever that percentage is, the immediate question becomes: who are the 5% or what are the 5% of the requests that are not fulfilled? Who's not getting into a course? And that's when we started to peel the layers with the school, where we realized that they have a scholars program where they have a lot of academic achievers that enroll in the school and students who are scholars.

And they were concerned that, hey, are those the students that are missing out on some course requests, potentially? Are those students getting into all of them? And this used to be a complete black box for them.

So with this build that we did, we were able to, over different scenarios, as we iterated across scenarios, also able to build the tools to prioritize specific students or scholars, depending on whatever criteria the school decides.

From not having any criteria, from not having any insight on who and what got prioritized in what circumstances, this became a lever that they could control, where scholars could be prioritized, and you could run a schedule with that, you could run a schedule without it and see what happens and pick the best one.

So this was another unlock that had happened.

The final thing that I want to show you, and this was also something that over the years had just become something that everybody had gotten used to, is that check this student schedule out.

I'm just taking a sample student here.

And you'll notice-- let me take a slightly more busy one.

And you'll notice that there is no dedicated lunchtime here.

And that's because depending on how busy the student was, the students would not have a dedicated lunchtime.

Some students would sometimes have lunch at 9:00 a.m., sometimes they would have it at 2:00 p.m.

It would be different every single day.

Scheduling is hard enough as is.

I mean, they've got three people, eight weeks, doing this over the summer.

To introduce the added constraint of factoring a lunch between periods three and seven was extremely difficult.

And as you can imagine, as administrators, telling students that, "Hey, we don't know what time you're going to have lunch on a particular day," is probably not the best idea, and students would want to have predictable lunches.

So that became another thing that we were able to test out with the scenario.

So I'm going to go to the third anonymized scenario, where as you can see, I'm going to take a sample student.

Let's just take this one, where the way we tested it out is that the administration wanted to see what happens if we mandatorily enforced a free period between periods three and six for every student every single day.

They need to have at least one free period so they can get the lunch.

They don't have to eat in class.

They get the lunch.

And we did that.

We ran that schedule.

We enforced that over here.

And the percentage fulfillment was not significantly impacted again.

The point is that from having a schedule where they could not test out these options, they could not make strategic calls, they could not make strategic choices about what kind of experience they want to offer to students, it became something that they had complete control over.

So I'm going to take you back to what I was showing.

So, yeah.

So over here.

So it started with effort.

When we first started this, it started with just effort, where we also thought, my thinking was that, we're going to help them with scheduling.

It takes a lot of time.

Let's help them save time.

That's what we had thought of.

But what very quickly happened is that we started to dig under the surface and started to see the deeper levels and layers that got unlocked.

And the first one was very obvious, as I told you, where they had multiple, instead of having one take it or leave it option at the end of the summer, you could now have 8, 12, 16 options to pick from.

That alone is a big change, that my time is now spent on curating the schedule.

It's choosing what to run in the schedule and picking the option instead of just having one.

But as we got to the levels deeper.

If you think about the rooms constraint thing, it's the kind of thing that if you're constrained on rooms, and we've heard this from other schools too, depending on their circumstances, sometimes they arrive at the conclusion that they need a new building.

So from potentially arriving at that conclusion to discovering hidden space, that was a new level that we unlocked that is not fully scheduling related.

You don't think of that when you think of scheduling, but it started to go under the layers and started becoming deeper and deeper.

The lunch thing was similar.

We did not know that this lunch thing could be a thing.

And as we started to peel back the layers and go deeper into the iceberg, we saw that, hey, from not having a lunch period to at least having the choice of having a predictable lunch and having that in class.

The idea being that you can pick which one you want.

You don't have to commit to just one option that's reactive.

You can intentionally design schedules that reflect your strategy and pick the best one.

And the best thing that I want to leave you with, and the policy part that you see at the bottom, that's what I want to leave you with.

We had a very interesting interaction where I met with their head of school, the academic team, the scheduling team.

We were all in a Zoom call like this one, and we were going over the results.

And at one point, the academic team or the head of school, I forgot which one, they raised a question.

They said that they were trying to think of their academic offering, and they said something along the lines of, "Hey, what if we change that elective?" Or, "What if we change that offering or offer a new elective?" And the immediate response from their colleagues was that, "Well, we can't do that because our schedule wouldn't allow that." And that's when the question became, "Hey, does your schedule define your policy or does your policy define your schedule? Which way is this going to be?"So that was the point of no return for the senior admin team, right? Where it suddenly became clear to them that it's going to be policy that drives scheduling, that we need to have a say in those important discussions.

It impacts how we curate that experience for our students, for our teachers, and they became intentional and strategic about it.

This is the first school that I wanted to tell you about.

Let's go to the second one.

So the second one is a mid-size school.

It's a school in Georgia, a middle to upper school.

And they had about 500 to 600 students.

And in that context, the thing was that they were looking for scheduling help because they were moving to a new student information system, and they weren't really sure if they would continue to use the old one or they would have a new one.

They weren't sure of the scheduling capabilities, and they wanted to test that out.

So they wanted to do scheduling, and let me show you what happened there.

So I'm going to go to the one in Georgia, and I just want to make sure you can still see my screen.

Perfect.

So once again, and again, this is something that I might sound like a broken record at the end of this, but firstly, we gave them seven to 10 options to pick from, and if there's one thing you take away from this session, it's know that you don't have to live with just one schedule at the end of this.

The fundamental process of strategic scheduling is that you define the scenarios, you curate the options and pick the best one.

That's the fundamental change in the strategic scheduling workflow.

So in this case, I'm showing you the first one that we gave them.

Actually, let me show you this one.

Yeah, let me show you this one, where 580 students, 66 teachers, they were somewhat doing it with their SIS, somewhat doing it by hand.

They were used to fulfillment that was somewhere in the 70s, 80s.

First choice fulfillment.

Now, I'm not talking about completion, I'm talking about first choice fulfillment.

And they were moving to a new SIS, and we did the scheduling for them straightforward.

Nothing fancy here to see.

You can see the students, you can see year-long courses, bigger courses.

Straightforward, nothing fancy.

It became interesting when we presented the results.

So I want you to check this out.

Over here, it says that 124 courses have a total of 299 sections.

Turns out this is not the schedule that the school asked for.

The schedule they asked for was this one, where they had 424 sections.

So what happened? Because of a bunch of legacy reasons and legacy practices, they were used to calculating their section count based on how they had always done it.

We've always done it this way.

So they would determine how many sections they need based on a method that they had derived a long while ago.

And when they gave that information to us, we inadvertently, we did not realize that this is erroneous, we assumed that the section count is flexible.

And as long as we stick to the teacher constraints, as long as teachers are not double-booked, as long as teachers are able to teach back-to-back, and as long as kids are getting into courses, we mistakenly assumed that, hey, we can reduce the number of sections.

So what happened was that the school got pretty high fulfillment percentage.

Here you can see that this is somewhere in 95, 96% fulfillment with 100 sections removed.

So no student-teacher ratio balance or threshold was exceeded.

The school defined the maximum enrollment size for every class, and it so happened that we only needed 299 sections.

We did not need all 424.

They were running with excess capacity.

They were running with more sections than they needed because that's how it had always been.

And when I presented this to the head of upper school, I got two reactions.

Reaction one was that they loved it.

"Great, this is fantastic.

Balance for teachers.

Everybody's happier." But the second reaction was, "Well, I'm in trouble because I have already signed my teaching contracts, so I cannot take these 299 sections to my staff and my faculty.

For this year we've signed the contracts.

I need you to run the 424.

But it's an interesting idea for next year where we can potentially discover teaching contracts or consider doing teaching contracts after we do scheduling because it's a connected process." So what started out again as a scheduling problem, what started out again as something that we thought was just about the time and the effort and the transition it took for people that they were spending a lot of weeks, they were going to a new SIS, and we can automate the process for them, we can give them multiple options.

And yes, that happened, but it turned out to be more than that.

It turned out to be, once again, an iceberg with multiple levels and layers deeper, where the first layer we unlocked was that, hey, when you have a new SIS or a new system, and could be an LMS, SIS, anything, you need a scheduling system that's resilient to the transition.

Because if you lose that SIS, you're going to be in trouble if that goes away.

So first, we discovered that.

The second one, of course, the other thing I didn't tell you about this school was that a little bit of the excess capacity, not all of it, a little bit of the excess capacity was for new students who would have joined after school reopened.

So they were planning in advance for new students.

Now, what happens then is that courses and the master schedule is already set.

Those students cannot really give you their free choices.

They have to pick from what's available.

But if they're doing this strategically, if they're using a system that can optimize it, you can guarantee new students the same fulfillment that you can guarantee existing students.

So this idea that the new students don't have to be restricted to what's already been put there.

They can, given the choices, you can run the whole thing and pick from one of the options, depending on what happens in the results.

You can make them that promise that you will get the courses you ask for.But the most interesting thing that we completely did not expect was that, you know what this means for faculty.

It means balanced classes.

It means classes with predictable sizes, not uneven sizes.

It means consolidated sections, fewer sections without violating the student-teacher ratio.

It leaves you space for planning time.

It reduces burnout.

And at the bottom of the iceberg was the fact that you can consider doing teaching contracts after scheduling options have been evaluated.

So we were thinking of scheduling operationally, right? About effort and time, and yes, that's true.

That's true.

It is about time and effort and fulfillment.

But there are so many deeper strategic layers under the hood in this iceberg that with this school we discovered a completely unique set of things that were really driving the decisions that were not at the surface when they were doing this process.

So this is the second school that we worked with.

I want to show you the third one now.

So the third one is a smaller school in North Carolina, again, middle and upper school.

So I'm going to quickly take you to the North Carolina example.

Small school, they were doing this.

The head of upper school would spend a few weeks doing this by hand.

It would take them a lot of time to do it.

And as you can see, once again, this is something standard, multiple options to pick from, multiple scenarios to pick from.

Each one of these only takes about three to four hours to build.

So if you're doing this strategically, you can build a new schedule in less than a day, half a day, right? So when you can do that, you can have multiple options.

But I'm going to show you the anonymized version here, where I want you to see that, again, 99.8% fulfillment, two terms over here.

Very, very high numbers, right? These are numbers we're not used to.

Once again, student schedule is not a problem.

You can see that semester-long courses, year-long courses, rooms, teachers, the whole thing was done.

It worked out great.

And that's where it became interesting.

So two things happened.

Firstly, why is this not at 100%? If we're so inchingly close, why is this not at 100%? One of the reasons was very simple.

They had a few courses like this one I'm showing you, Chemistry Foundations, where the capacity was 20 and the demand was 23.

So they had predetermined the demand.

They had predetermined section caps, perhaps based on rooms, perhaps based on something else.

So this was an easy fix, right? Where we told them that, "Hey, if you're flexible on this, you can potentially get 100% fulfillment." And they did that.

So if I take you to the second one over here, this was 100% fulfillment.

And what I mean by 100% fulfillment, I'm talking about every single student getting every single first choice course without alternates in a reliable manner.

No alternates, no trade-offs, everybody getting into every course they want.

So this was the first unlock for them where this is not something that, again, because they're doing it by hand, they're getting 50, 60% fulfillment.

Frankly, a lot of them aren't even tracking it because who's tracking percentages when it's a big puzzle with Post-its or Excel that you're doing? But big unlock for them to have that.

But the even bigger unlock was right here.

So I'm going to take you to this tab.

One of the things that the head of upper school wanted to do for the last three to five years, like as a school they wanted to do, is have a dedicated common planning period for every department.

They wanted creative arts, for example, all the faculty in creative arts, all the faculty in English, all the faculty in every single department to be blocked off for an entire block or an entire period in a recurring manner so they could plan together.

It's a great idea, except scheduling is hard enough anyway.

It's hard enough to get high fulfillment.

Getting common planning periods and blocking out an entire department of teachers from not happening is an added level of complexity that is very hard to deal with.

So we gave this a shot with them.

Again, something new for us, the iceberg under the surface.

So we gave it a shot.

For every department, as you can see, we identified a common planning period where no teacher from that department is teaching a course.

And we found the optimal planning period such that the fulfillment was still 100%.

Zero impact on fulfillment.

Everybody gets everything they want.

The point here is not that you can get 100% every time.

The point is that you can run a schedule scenario without common planning period.

You can run a schedule with the common planning period, and you can see the drop in percentage and then decide if that's something you want to live with.

If the 100% went to 85%, you may not want to live with that.

But if 100% goes down to 99.4%, well, then you can make that decision that, "Hey, everybody getting that common planning period time versus a few courses that people sacrifice.

Are we okay with that trade-off?" The point is that it's a choice and a decision that schools are not able to make because this is operational, right? It's a huge operational hassle.

There is no strategic fine-tuning of these competing priorities, and schools don't have the choice.

So you can make that choice by seeing what happens, by testing scenarios and having data-driven options to pick from.

There was another constraint that I haven't told you.

I can go in to talk about this all day in terms of how many constraints we saw, but another constraint I want to show you is section balancing.

A lot of schools want, naturally so, balanced classes, right? Where you don't want a situation where if you have different sections of a course, you have a five and 35, right? You don't want that.

You want them to be as balanced as possible.

So in this case, we were able to balance those courses.

So check this out, 19 and 20.

If I take another course, let's just take AB Spanish, right? 17 and 20.The courses, the sections are balanced because this is taken as a parameter from the school.

They can define the threshold that's acceptable to them for section balance, and once again, see what happens.

That's what the options are for.

See what happens.

Have a policy, have something you want to test as a constraint, see what happens, and then decide if you want to live with that or not.

So this was the third school where this, again, was a big unlock for them.

Again, it started with options and speed.

It just started with what we saw above the water.

It started that, you know what? This is faster.

We can give you 10 options.

This is great.

That's what it started as.

But it very quickly became about the deeper priorities that started to come above the surface.

The fact that are your sections balanced across size and gender or not? What is the threshold at which you accept balance? Are you able to commit and guarantee to parents and teachers that you'll follow the balance? That's the first thing we discovered.

The second one became fulfillment, having really high fulfillment numbers.

Again, doesn't have to be 100%.

In our case, half of the schools we worked with are 100% fulfillment, but it doesn't have to be 100%.

The point is, can you consistently promise extremely high fulfillment numbers for all students? The difference between a 90% and 100% first choice fulfillment, let's say you're a school with 1,000 students, and every student wants, say, 10 courses.

I just made that up, but that's about 10,000 requests.

The difference between a 90% and 100% is 1,000 course requests that have not been fulfilled.

1,000 course requests that have not been fulfilled.

That's the difference between the 90s and the 100s.

So the ability to give optimal results and to promise everybody that you can get that year on year, this is not accidental.

This is not fluke.

We have a method for this, makes the strategic layer come up.

The common planning periods are a huge win.

The ability to commit and promise to every teacher and every department that, "Hey, you will get dedicated prep times," is super important.

The ability to give them the confidence that, hey, we can test out new electives.

You will never hear that our schedule does not allow that.

You give us a new elective, we'll run a scenario with, we'll run a scenario without.

We can test new electives, see the impact, and then tell you if we can offer that or not.

Huge unlock.

And the biggest of all is that in this particular case, it's a small school.

They don't have the luxury of hiring three people for eight weeks to do this for them.

Small schools with the right tools can operate with the resources of a big school.

They can get the results of a big school, they can get the leverage of a big school, and that's the real strategic unlock that happened.

It looked like just time and effort and scheduling, but there were so many other things under the hood that we discovered that made it strategic and not operational.

And this is the primary difference between strategic and operational scheduling, where operational scheduling is-- I'm actually going to reshare so it stops taking me back to that slide.

Operational scheduling is about making it work.

It's a scramble.

It's filling the grids, it's avoiding the conflict, it's assigning the rooms, it's placing singletons.

It's making it work because this is a hard thing.

It takes too much time.

Let's just make it work.

That's typically what we see as-- If you're seeing that, that's operational scheduling.

Strategic scheduling is about your school's missions, values, mission, and priorities.

You talk about multiple scenarios, the ability to pick and choose which schedule you want, the ability to see and test different constraints, have each of them express a strategic goal.

Things like common prep times, common planning periods becoming institutionalized.

That's what strategic scheduling looks like.

And efficiency percentages, fulfillment, that's only the starting point.

So none of this is to say that that's not important.

I'm just saying that's the tip of the iceberg.

That's only the tip of the iceberg.

The fact that you can save hundreds of hours, multiple weeks, multiple people, get better results, that's only the starting point.

That's par for the course.

In strategic scheduling, you only need to spend five to seven days, and really the five to seven days are for you to see which option you like best, picking from multiple options and having a process that anybody can run.

So this is the fundamental difference between operational scheduling, where we see most schools operate, and strategic scheduling.

The jump to strategic scheduling, where most schools see a lot of value being unlocked, see a lot of things changing fundamentally for the school, things they didn't think were related to scheduling.

This also has significant second and third order impacts.

So I have been briefly talking about all of these, but I'm going to summarize all of the second, third order impacts.

So when you're doing this strategically, at that point, it's not about the schedule.

At that point, it's not just about the fulfillment and the time and the effort.

The second and third order effects on your academic program are interesting, where you can test out new electives, you can offer new courses, test out new programs.

The point being, you can see their scheduling impact, see the trade-off, see the cost, see what you have to give up for it, and then make a data-backed decision on whether you want to live with that or not.

If you want to offer students a lunch, but fulfillment goes down by 1%, are you okay with that? That's the ability that you get on the academic program.

You get that flexibility.

Resources is the same thing, where you may have the rooms, you may feel like you don't have the rooms.

You're potentially considering fundraising for a new building or figuring that out, but you can have optimal room utilization.

You can have balanced classes for teachers.

Just imagine the ability to guarantee teachers or promise teachers, if not guarantee, that at this school, you don't have to teach more than two or three back-to-back classes, whatever that number is for you.

Because you have a system that can enforce that.

And how can that potentially change how teachers feel about how burnt out they feel or how overwhelmed they feel about the work?Stakeholders get impacted, right? When students get used to getting the courses they want, it becomes second nature to them.

It's expected behavior.

You get less calls from parents.

You get less switches.

You get lesser unhappy, grumpy parents, and they see the return on their tuition, right? They want children, students getting into their first choice courses and not having to settle for something because we couldn't make it work.

The most important thing is you, in strategic scheduling, you get to define and control the priority of courses.

This is probably the most important thing.

A lot of schools are doing this reactively, where depending on who you're talking to at the school, they don't actually know how scheduling works because one person really has to spend a lot of time doing it, and it's a real pain.

So they don't, because the problem's hard enough, there is no policy, there is no discussion of policy.

But you get that control back.

Administrators get that control back.

As a school, you get that control.

Hey, what is our section balance policy? As an institution, are we okay with a difference of two, three, five? Are we okay with that at the cost of somebody not getting into an AP course? These are important questions.

These are school-level questions, and administrators need to discuss them, define them, and then ensure it's enforced in the schedule.

Right now, something happened to the schedule, but a lot of folks don't actually know what's happening or who's taking those judgment calls at the end.

And the last one is process continuity.

This is one of those things where it's very hard to overstate or, I mean, it's very hard to calibrate the importance of this.

And I'll just tell you a story about this, where I had a conversation with a school here in Southern California in Los Angeles, and we had a conversation.

I spoke with the admin.

I spoke with the scheduler.

They liked it.

They wanted to park this discussion for later.

Great.

The conversation closed.

A few weeks later, I got an email from the admin, and the administrator said that, "Hey, I just found out that my scheduler and my registrar may not be coming back next year, and that puts us in a bit of a situation, so will you be able to help?" Right? So a lot of schools rely-- This scheduling knowledge is critical.

Schools need to work with it.

But it's not institutionalized.

It lives inside one person's head, and if that person or group of people leave or for any reason discontinue what they're doing, don't do that next year, schools find themselves in a situation.

It's not a pleasant situation to be in, right? So institutionalizing the process is another second, third-order effect of this thing.

So this is the difference between strategic and operating scheduling.

It's not making it work.

It's being intentional.

It's choosing.

It's curating the experience you want for your students.

And the question now is, why isn't scheduling strategic yet? I mean, it's 2026.

Why aren't more folks able to do this? Why isn't this happening for everybody right now? Why isn't this more mainstream? And to answer that question, I'm going to take you to Lakeside School in Seattle.

So this is a private school in Seattle.

And in the 1970s, they had a very famous student go to high school there called Bill Gates.

Now, we all know who Bill Gates is.

He would eventually, again, personal opinions and likes and dislikes aside, he would go on to change the world with Microsoft, with all of that.

But before he did any of those things, his second project, his second serious endeavor in life was building a scheduling solution for Lakeside School, and this was in the 1970s.

We're talking 50, 56 years ago.

And we know that because Mr.

Gates wrote about it.

He wrote a book that came out last year called "Source Code." He talks about his beginnings and his early years, and he goes into an extraordinary amount of detail about how he tried to do scheduling at Lakeside School.

And I read that book.

I use a Kindle, so I also highlighted things, and then I exported my highlights for this webinar, which I'm sharing with you now, and he had some very interesting things to say.

The first thing that he said, and he went into an extraordinary amount of detail.

I mean, for a guy who's talking about his life, he's spending too much time on scheduling in high school, and that's the first thing that was surprising to me.

But what he said was, "The task of scheduling, which a math teacher had been managing, was proving far more difficult than expected.

Some students arrived on campus in September to discover they were scheduled for classes that didn't exist.

Others were slotted for French I in a room where Latin was underway.

Kids overwhelmed their advisors with questions, formed long lines at the registrar's office, and asked, 'Can you change this because I have all my classes in a row and then four free periods?'" He then went on to describe the complexity in even more detail, where he said that "There are so many variables to coordinate, starting with the needs and desires of hundreds of kids, each taking nine classes in an 11-day period.

Throw into the mix 70 courses, 170 sections, special considerations.

Drum class cannot be above the room where choir is happening.

Most classes have one period.

Sometimes there's a double period." It was a very hard math problem.

He concludes that by saying it was a very hard math problem.

And he finally shares that experience two pages later where he says, "For about three weeks, my friend and I and four teachers worked 20-hour days trying to cobble together a schedule in time for the next trimester.

We skipped school, struggled to not make mistakes as each night wore on and fought off fatigue." Now, this is a smart person, right? I mean, this is somebody who's competent, is good at math, knows technology, and as we know, with the benefit of history, is going to change the world.

So this is a competent person.

This is the right man for the job.

This is somebody qualified taking on the scheduling problem and highlighting just how brutally hard it is, just how difficult it is.

And-That's part of the reason why scheduling is not strategic, and I want to give you a mental model to really visualize that difficulty, because I think once we frame the problem correctly, only then can we start changing the way things are done at school.

But I want to give you a mental model of how to think of this.

Imagine a Rubik's Cube.

Now, I'm sure all of us have seen these at some point.

It's that thing where you've got six colors and six sides, and they're all scrambled together, and the goal is to unscramble it or move things around in such a way that you have the same color on every side.

And I used to love these growing up, and I was not good at this.

I was not good at this.

My crowning achievement was being able to figure out one color.

I figured out one color, and then I thought, "Okay, well done.

I can now figure out the other colors." And I was wrong, because every move affects all sides.

You cannot do this sequentially.

The possibilities are such a big number.

It's 43 quintillion.

I don't even know how big that number is.

It's very complex for most people, right? You can't just do one color at a time or only think about the red color and not think about the others.

It's very hard.

Turns out, scheduling is just like solving a Rubik's Cube, where imagine if you had that cube and green represents your students.

So you've got 200, 300 students.

Everybody's making 10 requests.

You've got 3,000, 4,000, whatever that number is, a few thousand course requests, and you want to make sure that you're fulfilling as many of them as possible.

Yellow represents teachers, where teachers have their own constraints.

Some of them love their homerooms.

Maybe they want common preps.

You have a policy on back-to-back classes.

Then you've got your courses.

You have your APs, you've got core run courses, sometimes you have singletons, you want to try out a new elective.

You've got your course catalog, where important things and pathway courses need to be fulfilled.

You've got rooms.

That's another color.

You've got capacity constraints, special rooms, capacity shared spaces, whatnot.

You've got rules.

A lot of schools have a rule of section balancing.

They have rules on core running classes.

They have all sorts of rules and constraints that creep in.

But what we don't think is another color for mission.

Your school's mission statement is another consideration in this Rubik's Cube, where are all students getting equal access? Are families seeing their kids get into courses they want? The scheduling problem is like a Rubik's Cube, where what ends up happening, and this is the reason why it's not strategic yet, most schools are not solving the whole cube.

In status quo, and at least based on my experience of having spoken with 150, 200 schools, they are not solving the whole cube.

They are only solving one or two colors, the ones that they see, because they can't see what's at the back, and it's hard to internalize that the minute you move one thing, everything else moves.

I can't move back-to-back classes for that one teacher who only wants it that way without impacting fulfillment or other courses or rules or space.

Everything's connected to each other, and they're only seeing a few colors.

And to be fair to schools, current tools aren't built for this, so on some level, it's not your fault.

If you're using Post-its, you can't-- If I told you to solve a Rubik's Cube using Post-its, you'd throw me out of the room, right? I mean, what are you saying? It's not going to happen.

What a ridiculous idea.

But that's how many people have to do scheduling.

But it's really hard.

If you're really smart, you can try spreadsheets.

You can really try spreadsheets, but I don't know how to model a Rubik's Cube onto a spreadsheet or even something like that where you have a multivariable optimization problem.

So maybe if you're really good at Excel, you can do it, but out of reach for most people.

Many schools use their SIS, they use their student information system, and that is why they are in the situation they're in, where it solves two to three colors if you're lucky.

If you're lucky.

One of the craziest stories I had heard from a school when we were working with them, I didn't show you that example.

It's a different school in Maryland.

They were using their SIS for scheduling, and they came to us for help, and we were trying to understand how it works.

And they said that their SIS scheduler gave them 10% fulfillment.

After they put in all the rules and constraints, they got 10% fulfillment.

So for many schools, the SIS is typically not a viable option, and even if it is, it's only solving two or three colors.

The cool new thing is ChatGPT.

So a lot of people ask me, "Hey, can I solve the Rubik's Cube with ChatGPT?" Well, given the way it hallucinates, it might probably give you a seventh color that doesn't exist.

So you could try solving it on ChatGPT, but it's anybody's guess whether that works or not.

But on a technical note, ChatGPT is also not the right solution for this kind of a problem.

Current tools don't work, and that is part of the reason why schools only solve one or two colors.

You're either solving it in isolation or you are solving it sequentially, and both of those are suboptimal.

So when you're doing both of those things, I'll give you a more practical insight.

Rooms will always get solved because rooms are a physics constraint.

It's a practical constraint.

You cannot negotiate with physics.

You cannot invent a chair if it doesn't exist or have a new table.

So this is a very hard constraint.

Even if you're not utilizing your rooms correctly, you will still end up making rooms work out one way or another.

And once you do that, you're lucky if you're able to solve two or three other colors.

Depends on, again, this is where it depends from school to school.

Some of them are able to do some things, some of them are not able to do some things.

But the most important thing is that solving two or three colors is operational.

If you want to make the jump to strategic scheduling, if you want to make that leap, you're fundamentally solving the entire cube.You need to look at all colors.

We need to appreciate the nature of the problem.

The right group of people need to be involved in having an opinion on it.

So if you want to solve all the colors, what that looks like is students getting high fulfillment every single year, 95 to 100%, whatever that number is, every single year, while teachers also have prep times and balanced workloads.

Core courses have high fulfillment.

Rooms are properly utilized.

Sections are balanced.

Teachers don't have to change multiple rooms.

To be able to solve all of these things is what it means to do strategic scheduling.

You need a policy for this.

You need to think about a framework for this.

You need to think about what's most important for your school.

You need to think about what takes priority over what, and the ability to solve the entire cube is what lets you do strategic scheduling.

So this is what strategic scheduling is, solving the whole cube, including the parts that you can't see.

And if you're interested in solving the cube, this is the work we do at ScheduleX.

So we help schools solve the cube.

So if you're looking for help with solving this at your school or getting to know more, feel free to reach out.

My name is Sahil.

I'm the co-founder at ScheduleX.

Prior to this, I spent four and a half years at Toddle.

Toddle is a learning management system.

That's how many of you might know me, and I know many of you.

I was their regional head in North America.

I always wanted to build something of my own.

And then I met my co-founder, Kristin, and Kristin spent 12 years at Blackboard, another two years consulting with Blackboard schools.

She has helped hundreds and thousands of schools try and use the Schedule Maker module, but it didn't work.

So she wanted to build a scheduling solution, I wanted to build something, and we teamed up.

Since we have a lot of tech directors on the call, we are FERPA and SOC 2 compliant.

We don't pass on your data to LLMs.

ChatGPT is not doing this, just to clarify and put it out there.

So don't worry, your data is safe, and we work with schools all over the country, East Coast, West Coast, Northwest, everywhere.

I put the cubes in.

I first had triangles, then I put the cubes.

I thought it was funny.

So before we end the session, I want to leave you with some reflection questions, and then we can do questions.

But I want to do some reflection questions.

Question one, if your current scheduling team did not show up tomorrow, what happens to your school? The reason doesn't matter.

Again, things can happen in life, but if the person or the team did not show up and you didn't have that on 15th of July, what happens? Second, in case of a scheduling conflict, what gets prioritized? Is that policy documented or in someone's head? Does everyone agree with that policy? And I'll give you an example.

A bad answer to this question is seniors over juniors.

That's true for everybody.

That's not specific.

The question is, if you only had one spot and three seniors wanted it, which senior gets in first? Is there a policy for that? Does everybody know about that? Do parents know it? Does the admin know it? Has the admin signed off on it? Does everybody agree it's the right thing to do? Does it align with your mission, or does that live in somebody's head and they have to make that executive call? The third reflection question is, what is the historical first-choice fulfillment at your school, let's say, for the last three to five years? Do you know that number offhand? And if you don't, can you find that out? Do you know if it's 70%, 80%, 90%, 93%, 95%, 100%? What is that number? How big is the problem? How many students have to settle for something else or have done so in the last three to five years? And finally, does your schedule reflect your constraints or your mission statement? These are the questions I want to leave you with.

Our work is focused on helping schools convert scheduling from this annoying summer project into a strategic lever.

So if you want to solve the cube, feel free to reach out.

I'm happy to take questions.

I also added our email here, hello@schedulex.ai, so feel free to reach out, but this is strategic scheduling.

Operational is about making it work.

Strategic is about being intentional, thinking about the things it impacts, and choosing as an institution on what is right for you, seeing what happens, and then making that choice.

Sahil, thank you so much.

I loved that Rubik's Cube analogy.

It's so true, and I personally have never even been able to solve one side of a Rubik's Cube, let alone the whole thing.

So, this is an awesome product, and thanks so much for sharing some great use cases.

We do have a question in the chat from Bruno.

In your demo, you have a Blackboard download button.

What is that used for? Right.

So a lot of schools we work with use one of the popular student information systems, Blackboard, Veracruz, PowerSchool, FACTS.

So when they're done with scheduling, they need it back in the SIS.

So that's the export that we built for them, where if they hit that button, they get the import file right away, and they can just import it into the SIS.

So that's what it was for.

Good observation, though.

I didn't realize the button was up there.

Thank you.

Do we have any other questions for Sahil? Well, thank you so much again for sharing.

Thanks for your partnership with Atlas and your support of this community, and we look forward to seeing you very soon in Columbus at the Atlas annual conference.

Absolutely.

I'm looking forward to seeing as many people here as possible at the conference in Ohio.

So thank you so much for taking out the time.

I hope this was useful, and feel free to reach out, and have a great rest of your week..