For everyone that thinks scheduling is easy...forget about it! Every new school start or every semester break we always get kids in the office wanting to change "their" schedule because "someone" gave them a not-so-good one! (We wonder who the "someone" is....just say it, I dare you!) I am here to tell you that it is NO EASY TASK!!
Marcie and I have been working on the new master schedule for quite some time now. The process is a long one, with many trials and tribulations.
First we must get requests from the students and then enter those requests into the computer. Then we have to go through the requests and make sure that those students with specific requirements (flunking a class, not having graduation requirements completed, credit deficiency, tri-tech or running start) have them worked into their requests (so they can graduate...on time!!). After this is done then we look at the number of requests for each class and look at the teachers we are going to have and then look at the classes that the teachers are going to teach. Once that is worked out we assign each teacher classes that they are going to teach (because 1 class time has to be a "prep" for them) and then compare those notes with the requests of the students. We are now in the process of assigning the number of sections that we are going to have and make sure that the number of students to fill those sections are in sync (too many means we must look at alternates that the students have picked and start switching some classes around within the students requests).
The next step is putting classes on the scheduling board that are placed because they have certain requirements, such as team-teaching, classroom sharing, special education, and building sharing. Next single classes on the scheduling board, keeping in mind how many conflicts that these particular classes have with other single classes. Once these classes are on the board they must stay there. The next classes to add are the ones with 2 meeting patterns and then 3. After these the board will be about 1/3 - 1/2 complete. The next step is to add all the number of students, for each period, for each grade level. This number must be compared with the total number of students per grade level. We must make sure that every period has enough classes for the number of students in each grade level. Are we having fun yet?????
We are at the step of making sure that each period has enough students for each grade level in it. This step really stinks. We have one period that doesn't have enough juniors and another one that has too many sophomores. The freshman and the seniors are pretty much done, except when we go and try to accomodate for the juniors and sophomores. At 3:00 this afternoon we decided enough was enough for the day and the week and will pick up where we left off Monday morning.
Oh, but we won't be done yet. Once we have numbers even for everyone we go into the computer and add the sections to the classes as per the "scheduling board". When this is complete we push the "auto schedule" button on the computer and presto it gives us schedules for everyone....or those that it can get to process. We must then go and run reports to find out how many people are missing classes for a particular period. When we get those names we can manually look at them and decide if something is massively wrong and go back to an earlier step, or if we have just a few it means hand scheduling those lucky students.
The point of all of this: there's more than just YOU that goes into creating a master schedule for a high school. Be glad you have classes!!!!!
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