As we near the end of the semester, we have kids and parents periodically asking about their schedules for next year. I want to give you a look inside the process of creating schedules so you’ll get an idea of ALL the stuff that has to happen before we can get them to you.
First, we collect registration forms from students. Academic courses are chosen by a student’s teachers based on his/her grades and progress in their classes. It is expected that every student have at least one English, Math, Science, and Social Studies course. Many will also have a Foreign Language, which is also considered an academic. In addition to the academics, we ask that students number 8 electives for us to fill in the remaining spots in their schedules. We ask for 8 because it is inevitable that there will be some schedules that will not “make” with a student’s top choices. This gives us the ability to go back to the registration sheet and find an alternative in the event that their first choices are full or won’t fit in the schedule.
After this is completed, we must enter ALL the course requests on these registration forms into the computer system. This can take a while because it is done by hand. There are always missing forms, so earlier this week, we sent out blank forms to students for whom we had no requests asking them to fill in what was missing. Generally these were for students whose form was lost, simply did not turn one in, or was not here for registration. We got many of these back, but there are some students that still have not turned in a form. For these students, we are left with no other choice but to decide on classes for them based on what we see they need to graduate and previous elective choices. Sometimes we choose things kids are happy with and sometimes we don’t. Because we are dealing with about 1900 students, there is not time, nor is it fair for those kids who have turned in their forms according to directions, to have individual meetings with each of these kids. At some point, we just have to move forward with our scheduling process
Next, a report is created that tells us how many students have signed up for each course. This tells us how many teachers we need for each subject, based on how large each class can be. Sometimes we have to hire new teachers and sometimes we lose teachers if there aren’t enough kids needing a particular course. The number of teachers we can have is determined by the number of students enrolled in the school, but how they are organized based on what they teach is determined by what kids need. This is why it is such a BIG DEAL when kids decide after the fact that they want to change their schedules. If we create a class because a certain number of students signed up for it and then, students want to drop it, a teacher’s job could be at stake. Not good. If you’re reading this, please explain this to your friends because we aren’t being mean when we won’t change a schedule (hey, I personally never want a kid to be unhappy with their schedule!), but if they signed up for it, each and every teacher is counting on those students to have a job next year. If even a fraction of the 1900 students at Kell decide to change just one course on their schedule, it could completely rearrange the master schedule, dissolve some courses that are on the border of having enough students to justify a teacher teaching it, and, yes, we could lose teacher allotments for a specific subject, leaving someone searching for a job in August. We don’t take schedule changes lightly and I hope that this helps explain why. Not to mention the man-hours it would take to make those changes that would simply be because of preference. So, courses need to be chosen wisely.
So, after numbers are determined, a master schedule is created which determines who will teach what course when. This is easier said than done, because there are certain courses that need to be taught at specific times, certain teachers need a particular planning period, “singleton” courses must not conflict with other “singleton” courses that the same group of kids may be taking, and so on. It’s like a huge logic puzzle. Moving one thing may mean that something else has to be moved, which affects something else, etc. In creating the master schedule, the goal is to try to make the courses as accessible as possible so we can maximize the number of individual schedules that will “make” without error.
Once this is ready, we can run the scheduling program that automatically places students into tentative schedules based on best fit. I say tentative because there are always tweaks that need to be made and there are always schedules that have errors. Sometimes we don’t see certain problems until after we run the scheduler. This can cause us to create different versions of the schedule with the hopes of finding the best. Often, individual schedule errors happen because a student wants two courses that have been scheduled at the same time. Because, obviously, only one course can fit in one slot, this knocks the other out and creates a hole that must be filled. Sometimes this problem occurs for several students and it makes sense to alter the schedule to accommodate this error. However, sometimes, it is just one student with the conflict. In these cases, we can’t justify changing the schedule to suit one student. This is when we must go back to those registration sheets to see what other courses that student had marked. Another reason for an error could be that the student simply didn’t sign up for enough courses. There are various other reasons that are a little more complicated so I won’t explain every one, but just know that there’s always clean-up that must occur.
Hopefully, somewhere around this point we can print schedules for kids so they can double-check what was entered and verify that they are correct. Sometimes course numbers were entered incorrectly (a student gets on-level Biology instead of honors Biology, for example, because the numbers are very similar). Sometimes students are signed up for the next level of a course but failed the prerequisite (can’t take Spanish II until he/she passes Spanish I, for example). We hand these out to students who can make notations for errors and then we fix them. During the summer we continue to tweak and fix in between registrations, phone calls, and records requests – some days, it seems like scheduling never seems to end. We get constant emails, calls, visits, etc. from people concerning schedules during the summer. Some things we can fix (parents requesting level changes), some we can’t (if two classes meet at the same time – impossible), and some we won’t (requests for specific teachers or lunch periods). If all goes well with this process, in August, the schedules are suitable for the majority of students and we can get on with what Kell does best – teaching and learning!
This is a very simplified explanation of the scheduling process, but hopefully it gives you some idea of the process we go through to get schedules created and into your hands by the start of school. If you have a question or comment, feel free to leave it on the blog and I will respond!
