Assessing Your Scheduling Software: Is it leading to overstaffing?
Is your district’s scheduling software leading to overstaffing? Here are some strategies to make the process more accurate.
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The following article by David James originally appeared in the July/ August 2024 School Business Affairs magazine published by the Association of School Business Officials International (ASBO). The text herein does not necessarily represent the views or policies of ASBO International, and use of this imprint does not imply any endorsement or recognition by ASBO International and its officers or affiliates.
Creating a school schedule, especially at the secondary level, is a data-intensive task. Schools must collect and organize data on enrollment, staffing, and classrooms, among many other variables. Many districts turn to scheduling software to help schools create schedules that optimize staffing efficiency.
Here is the good news: Most available scheduling software is already built into a district’s student information system, like PowerSchool or Infinite Campus. These tools can help teams schedule better and faster than ever before.
However, no software, no matter how powerful, can tell your schools how many staff members they need—only how to fill the schedules of the staff members they already have. This can—and often does—lead to overstaffing at the school level, sometimes to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
School business officials play a significant role in shining a light on opportunities to staff more precisely and efficiently. This task is more important than ever in the age of funding cliffs, especially to help district’s avoid undesirable—but potentially avoidable—cuts that limit opportunities for students.
Strategies for Efficiency and Cost-Effectiveness
The challenges of determining staffing are created within the software; however, they are best solved outside the software through decimal-level precision staffing, which requires schools and districts to be hyperspecific when determining staffing.
In one 16,000-student district, for example, use of decimal-level precision staffing helped identify more than $2.4 million in staffing efficiencies and allowed the district to maintain nearly all academic opportunities for students, even with a tighter budget.
Here are three strategies every school business official can implement to help district schools staff more precisely and ultimately maintain or even expand services and offerings for students.
1. Ensure that school-based scheduling teams are using approved class-size targets and accurate enrollment figures to build schedules.
Staffing precisely requires two key data points. The first is clear class-size targets, such as the maximum number of students that can be in a class at a time or the minimum number of students that a class needs to run. The second is accurate student course enrollment figures. Without both, staffing precisely is impossible.
One of the most important roles related to staffing for school business officials is to ensure that the district’s class-size targets are agreed on and are in writing. Administrators, department heads, and school teams must be aware of and use these targets when scheduling.
Here is an example: A high school is determining staffing assignments for its math department for the next school year and has 800 students enrolled in math.
Using class-size maximums, the school can then calculate the precise number of sections required for each course by dividing enrollment by the maximum class size (see Table 1).
In this case, the school would need 32 sections of math. If each math teacher is expected to teach five sections, the math department will then need 6.4 math teachers (more on the idea of a “partial” teacher later).
The math behind decimal-level precision staffing is not complex; the trick is making sure that the clear class-size targets and the most up-to-date enrollment figures are used for the calculation.
2. Create staffing options for teaching and learning teams to consider.
A common limitation of scheduling software is that it is hard to “see” the reasoning behind scheduling choices. One hypothetical school might choose to run eight sections of Algebra I with slightly smaller class sizes, for example, whereas a similar school might instead run seven sections of Algebra I with slightly larger class sizes and one section of math intervention.
No scheduling software can tell you what choice to make in this type of situation. This is another key step in the staffing and scheduling process where school business officials can add value.
To understand this further, let’s revisit the previous example and assume the sample school still has 800 students enrolled and needs 32 sections of math. But now let’s assume the school had eight math teachers instead of the 6.4 math teachers we calculated. What should the school do with the “extra” 1.6 full-time-equivalent (FTE) math teachers?
Whether the math department is staffed with eight teachers, 6.4 teachers, or some figure in between is a critical decision. A helpful strategy is to create multiple staffing options for school or district teams to consider, as the example below shows.
Staff 6.4 FTE
Goal: Staff as efficiently as possible.
Implementation: Staff as close to the class-size maximums as possible and hire a part-time (0.4 FTE) math teacher.
Staff 7.0 FTE
Goal: Staff a slightly smaller math department to account for a teacher retirement.
Implementation: Do not fill the position of the math teacher who is retiring; still staff to class-size maximums and use the “extra” 0.6 FTE to run three extra sections of math intervention.
Staff 8.0 FTE
Goal: Expand intervention and elective offerings without adding staff.
Implementation: Keep all eight math teachers; still staff to class-size maximums, and use the “extra” 1.6 FTE to run new or additional sections of math intervention or electives. All eight staff members will still have full workloads, but more students will get more of what they need.
All three staffing options can be “right,” but no scheduling software will tell you which one is best for your particular context. Such staffing decisions are best made by a team of school and district leaders. School business officials can play a valuable role in these conversations by compiling staffing data and helping develop precise staffing scenarios.
Keep in mind that the goal of precision staffing is not necessarily to always staff to optimal efficiency; students, after all, are students, not widgets. And as the previous example shared, sometimes it makes sense to staff 6.4 math teachers, whereas at other times it makes sense to staff eight math teachers. The crime is staffing eight math teachers when you really only need 6.4 math teachers to meet student needs.
3. Make staffing decisions more transparent by requiring them to be made “outside the software.”
Most scheduling software packages automatically run the types of calculations outlined earlier, but they seldom show the options or the decisions made. In other words, the software can easily “hide” key information and calculations, even if unintentionally.
For that reason, the best practice for school business officials is to create or require school teams to design one straightforward Excel spreadsheet in which data inputs and calculations are well defined and transparent for all stakeholders. This is especially the case if multiple different class-size targets are used, either by grade level or course level.
To stress the point: I recently worked with one large middle school that was overstaffed to the tune of $1.5 million because of variable and sometimes inaccurate class-size targets that were loaded (and somewhat hidden) in the software, but no one knew it until the data were exported from the software and gathered in one place. Typical savings often runs $250,000 a school, sometime less and occasionally a lot more.
The Future of Staffing and Scheduling
Artificial intelligence and more advanced scheduling software might help solve the challenge of overstaffing in the not too distant future. In the meantime, the best practice is still to take a tried-and-true approach to staffing and precisely calculate—to the decimal!—staffing needs based on target class sizes and actual student course enrollment. Doing so continues to be the best way to maximize staffing efficiency and opportunities for students.
David James is a former teacher and middle school administrator who serves as an advisor to more than 40 school districts across 15 states. He is co-author of the It's Time for Strategic Scheduling: How to Design Smarter K-12 Schedules That Are Great for Students, Staff, and the Budget, now available on Amazon. He also leads the Secondary Scheduling Academy, an accelerated hands-on training program for school and district leadership teams to enhance capacity for strategic scheduling, build buy-in for changes, and design effective, best practice-aligned schedules that are better for students, teachers, and the budget.