“The schedule contains the vast majority of resources in a typical school district and it is often one of the most overlooked tools to manage your resources effectively.”
– Caitlin Richard Chief Financial Officer (former) | Hartford Public Schools
the challenge
When Caitlin Richard joined Hartford Public Schools as CFO, the district was confronting a structural deficit of $60 million. As the district looked for ways to reduce costs, she kept running into the same problem: nobody could answer the question of how many teachers each school actually needed to build a high-quality and compliant schedule.
That number matters because the master schedule is where the bulk of a district’s costs are actually set. Every under-enrolled section, every course a certified teacher covers out of field, every elective that runs for nine students is a staffing decision. But like most districts, Hartford built schedules and budgets in separate processes, so the cost of those decisions were never evaluated.
Finance had its priorities: budget targets and the FTE allocations that needed to come down. Principals had theirs: course requests, graduation requirements, IEP mandates, and students showing up in September needing a complete schedule. But without shared data, neither side could see the full picture, which made it impossible to find the balance between what the budget could bear and what students actually needed.
Rich Lindwall, the school district’s Enterprise Data Systems Manager, had watched this play out for years. Each season, his team would walk schools through the mechanics of scheduling, and then each school would complete the process in isolation. For time-strapped school leaders, the most rational thing to do was start with what had worked the year before. “There was a lot of just copying and pasting from one year to the next,” says CFO Richard. Without a way to model something different, schools had no way to know whether they were over-staffed, under-staffed, or exactly right.
When staffing needs for the coming year were examined by district leaders, principals were concerned that fewer teachers meant fewer courses, and fewer opportunities for students. “Principals would say, ‘if I make these cuts, I can’t offer the courses students need,’” recalls Richard. “And we had no way to simulate the schedule with reduced staffing to verify what was actually possible.”
“The schedule contains the vast majority of resources in a typical school district,” says Richard, “and it is often one of the most overlooked tools to manage your resources effectively.”
the solution
The starting point was simple: what if scheduling and finance worked off the same data?
Timely was founded in 2023 by Paymon Rouhanifard, whose education in scheduling came the hard way. As superintendent in Camden, New Jersey, he watched a high school’s master schedule fail so badly that students spent the opening of school sitting in the cafeteria.
He built Timely with a co-founder who had been a district CFO, a pairing of former education leaders that reflects the company’s core insight: that master schedules and the budgets are actually the same decision executed in two disconnected rooms. The platform leverages technology to help districts draft schedules aligned with their instructional, staffing, and budget priorities at once.
With the benefit of insights from the Timely platform, Hartford educators and administrators could see what neither side could see on their own: a school-by-school FTE analysis showing, for each of the 11 high schools, current staffing levels, the staffing levels necessary to run a compliant schedule, and what the district’s FTE allocation actually allowed for. The CFO and school principals were finally looking at the same numbers. “We had a more objective sense of the staffing allocations that schools actually needed,” says Richard.
Lindwall says he saw the shift in real time: “Having finance in those initial conversations gave schools a forum to advocate for what they needed. Finance would say, ‘We think it can be done with 22 teachers.’ And schools could look at their data in Timely and say, ‘Actually, hold on. Let me walk through what that means for the schedule.'”
Equally important was the consistency of the analysis. In a district where principals had grown accustomed to advocating that their situation was unique, Timely’s uniform methodology reduced subjectivity from the conversation. And it cut both ways: when the data showed that a school genuinely needed more staff than the district had allotted, more staff was budgeted. “Schools started to gain confidence that we really were looking at the data to make decisions,” says Richard. “Some schools did need additional allocations. That helped show this was a good faith effort.”
Critical to getting staffing right was ensuring that special education needs were built into the schedule from the start. For the first time, SPED directors attended master scheduling meetings where they could review and provide feedback on inclusion configurations directly in the Timely platform, building schedules around what students with IEPs needed from the beginning rather than retroactively fitting them into a master schedule that was built without their needs in mind.
Richard describes it as one of the partnership’s most meaningful shifts: “Our special education team had never been involved before in the scheduling process. To actually be included from the start, that team was really excited about what that meant for a special education student.”
impact
When Hartford finished the scheduling season, it was able to capture approximately $2 million in realized savings across 11 high schools without eliminating a single employee, instead reducing forecasted hiring through more effective scheduling. “No teacher lost a teaching job in Hartford Public Schools,” says Richard.
As importantly, the data generated through the scheduling process became the foundation for a larger, statewide conversation. When Richard went to state legislators to make the case for additional funding, she brought the scheduling analysis. “I was able to say: listen, we are building schedules that are meeting student needs and their graduation requirements, but also are using staff as efficiently as we possibly can,” she recalls. “Our state representatives heard that and it actually led to them saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to give you the funding.'” Hartford received approximately $60 million in incremental state and city aid over two years.
The data Richard shared with legislators also represented real change for students and families. Across Hartford’s 11 high schools, schedules are ready earlier than ever before and more aligned to graduation requirements, student course requests, and student support needs.
“For the first time, we were able to build the schedule around what students actually needed, while also addressing real fiscal constraints,” says Richard. “And for a student with an IEP, that means their core instruction and support services are in the schedule from day one, not added in after everything else is already set.”
Schools are just further along, she says, and they’ve been able to get there at a quicker pace. This fall, for the first time, students across Hartford’s high schools walked through the door with a complete schedule already waiting for them.
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