It's Not Too Early to Think About Your SY 2024-25 Secondary School Schedule
Why It’s Not Too Early to Begin Thinking About Your SY 2024-25 Secondary School Schedule
As the current academic year draws to a close, school and district leaders are likely just finishing up or may still be working on creating the schedule for the upcoming school year. For many, the schedule building process will not have been without its share of frustrations and challenges, and the final schedule may fall short of meeting all the goals initially set. All too often, implementing better, best-practice aligned schedules is hindered by the timeline: school and districts run out of time either to come to consensus on scheduling goals, to build buy-in for changes to the schedule, or to align the budget and staffing with the schedule.
That’s why now—yes, now!—is the time to start thinking about SY 2024-25 secondary school schedules. By starting the conversation early, schools and districts can better set themselves up for scheduling success.
Here are some steps to take for strategic scheduling success in the future:
1. Assemble a scheduling team
Building a great schedule is hard. No one person has all the wisdom, expertise, authority, and data to build the best schedule by themselves. Changing a schedule can be politically challenging, and excluding teachers from the discussions often undermines support for a new, even better schedule. Building schedules as a team can help align schedules to priorities and ensure that they meet the needs of students and staff.
Start by convening a secondary scheduling team this spring that includes:
School Principal, to set overall scheduling direction, goals, and priorities, working closely with the assistant superintendent of teaching and learning to align on vision
Guidance Counselor or Assistant Principal, to manage the logistics and keep things on track
General Education Teacher(s), to provide input on scheduling decisions and tradeoffs from the perspective of general education instruction
Special Education Teacher, to provide input on scheduling decisions and tradeoffs from the perspective of student supports
Expert Scheduler, to use software to build student and teacher schedules
Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning, to set overall direction, goals, and priorities along with the principal, remove obstacles, clarify constraints, and provide guidelines and parameters
2. Assess the current schedule and align on priorities and non-negotiables
How time is allocated in a schedule is a reflection of a school’s priorities. A school that devotes 55 percent of its day to core instruction, for example, clearly prioritizes providing students with a strong foundation across the four core subjects. Assessing how time is currently used in the schedule is the first step to understanding your schedule and whether it aligns to your priorities.
To help with this, schedule teams should conduct a “use of time” analysis to determine what percent of the school day is devoted to different blocks of time, such as core instruction, academic intervention, and non-instructional time. The data from this analysis can help teams determine whether students and teachers are currently spending the right amount of time on the right activities during the school day. This data can also help inform conversations about school priorities.
A set of clear goals, priorities, and non-negotiables can help transform the schedule to become a for truly and positively impacting teaching and learning. Scheduling teams should first assess and collect feedback on the current schedule to inform potential priorities. A great way to do this is to conduct a Strategic Secondary Schedule Self-Assessment, which is included in our free How-To Guide for Designing Strategic Secondary Schedules. This assessment is a quick way to evaluate how well the schedule aligns with research-backed best practices for teaching and learning and for building and deepening student engagement.
Teams should then establish a small set of “must-have” and “nice-to-have” priorities to guide the schedule. Ultimately, the scheduling team should drive towards establishing a set of 3-5 specific priorities based on the school’s need to help drive the scheduling design process.
3. Take a closer look at the scheduling process
When it comes to building a strategic school schedule that reflects best practices, the process of building a schedule is key to success. Process can be the difference between a serviceable schedule and a great schedule.
Schedules are not built in a vacuum; they are greatly influenced by staffing and budgeting decisions. In many school systems, the schedules come last, after budgets and staffing have been set. That can often mean that well intentioned, best practice aligned schedules may not come to fruition. A better process puts schedules first, and then last again. Student course selections and estimates of the number of students needing intervention should happen first. Draft schedules next, and then make budgeting and staffing decisions. Schedules should be finalized based on the budget decisions, but final schedules should closely resemble the desired ones.
Further, the most strategic school schedules, or those that most closely reflect the school’s priorities and non-negotiables while aligning with best practices, are often built with the help of an expert scheduler. Designing a schedule takes a different set of skills than building a schedule. Again, this can be a common pitfall that schools and districts fall into, undercutting their thoughtful, carefully considered scheduling goals. Expert schedulers can help ensure student needs and requests are met, that staff are used efficiently, and that the schedule aligns with leaders’ vision and priorities. An expert scheduler should be intimately familiar with any scheduling software, tools, or process and be very familiar with goals and priorities established by the scheduling team.
Our free How-To Guide for Designing Strategic Secondary Schedules includes a Scheduling Process Self-Assessment to help schools quickly evaluate where there is room to improve the scheduling process to help create a more strategic school schedule.
Getting started on the SY 2024-25 schedule early can help create a more strategic secondary school schedule that better supports student learning and engagement. Take the time to build a scheduling team, to examine the current schedule and compare it to best practices, to identify school priorities and non-negotiables, and to assess and revise the scheduling process. Conducting these assessments now will leave ample time to make adjustments, better align the schedule and scheduling process with best practices, build buy-in for change, and implement the revised schedule successfully.
David James is a former teacher and school leader who serves as an advisor to more than 40 school districts across 15 states. He is co-author of 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.