Salem High School is the only comprehensive high school in Salem, Massachusetts, a mid-sized city on the North Shore, and one of 26 state-designated Gateway Cities — midsize urban centers that once anchored regional economies and today are reinventing themselves amid significant economic and social challenges. With a student enrollment of just under 1,000, Salem sits at a crossroads that many gateway cities know well: high ambition, significant need, and limited margin for error.

When Principal Glenn Burns arrived in 2021, the school ranked in the 14th percentile of all Massachusetts high schools. He also inherited a schedule built around several compounding challenges:

• The eight-period schedule was structured in a way that was uncommon and difficult to navigate.
• The special education model was a consult approach, in which special educators checked in with students only a few times per week, leaving many without consistent support.
• The course catalog included math classes that colleges wouldn’t accept.

Turning the school around required a clear vision and a school schedule that could operationalize the districts priorities for the school.

As Burns put it: “Scheduling is a beast. And if we wanted to make all of the changes we knew needed to happen for kids, we needed tools to do that.”

For years, Salem’s scheduling process was largely manual. Director of College and Career Counseling Meghan Grosskopf Sousa recalls a system in which the district’s student information system could only build complete schedules for about 50% of their students. The rest required hand-placement, student by student, which was no small feat when navigating a schedule spanning 27 Advanced Placement courses, two early college partnerships and 10 CTE pathways. 

The structure of the schedule made it harder still. Salem runs an eight-period “waterfall” schedule in which each content area meets during a different period every day of the week. Adding to the complexity: a high volume of singleton courses, CTE students requiring afternoon blocks for internships, early college partners anchored to fixed time slots, and students with disabilities and multilingual learners needing services carefully distributed across sections to avoid inadvertent tracking.

In the year before Timely, the process had become so unreliable that Sousa made a drastic call: she wiped the SIS schedule entirely and built every student’s schedule by hand over the summer. Even then, she couldn’t finish the freshman class in time, and students arrived at orientation without complete schedules.

The consequences fell hardest on students with disabilities. Under the old student support model, special educators spent the first weeks of school tracking down where students with IEPs had landed, then building their own push-in schedule around it. Burns describes the result plainly: “By the time they found all the kids, many had already mentally checked out. Students don’t say they’re struggling until they’re already failing, and by then it’s often too late.”

Every August also brought “Arena Day” – meant to be a dedicated support day for students before the school year began. Instead, it had devolved into scheduling triage, with counselors manually processing schedule-change requests from students. It was a wasted professional day, but more than that, it was a symptom of a deeper problem: the schedule wasn’t built around student needs.

Salem began its partnership with Timely in fall 2023. Then Superintendent Dr. Steve Zrike framed it simply to Principal Burns: “This is going to be a gift to you.”

Timely’s scheduling platform allows school leaders and schedulers to define their constraints, such as caps on multilingual learners per inclusion section, IEP service minutes, and CTE block requirements, and then run optimization cycles that honor those rules automatically across the full schedule.

Year one was a transition. Sousa used Timely’s optimization tools to create multiple scheduling scenarios as the school team worked through Salem’s unusual schedule structure and competing programmatic demands. The results were stronger than anything their SIS had produced, but the team was still largely fitting old practices into a new tool.

By year two, that changed. Salem’s Instructional Leadership Team took ownership of scheduling decisions, setting classroom caps, defining trade-offs, and choosing, for example, to sacrifice ninth-grade team cohorts in order to preserve AP access and full inclusion for students with disabilities. Those priorities became scheduling constraints and Timely’s optimization engine did the rest.

The difference showed up immediately. In summer 2025, Salem completed its master schedule before the school year ended, something that had never happened before.

Counselors who had spent the start of every school year managing schedule crises received final rosters weeks before the year began. Teachers reviewed class lists before leaving for summer. Arena Day became what it was meant to be: a focused check-in for students who genuinely needed support, not a day of damage control.

As Sousa put it: “I have never started the year with this kind of excitement. I am normally a panicked mess for months. The amount of feedback we received since we went live has been overwhelmingly positive. Kids are really excited with their schedules.”

She added: “This process has created a more balanced schedule for an urban comprehensive school with a very complex schedule.”

Time Savings

With Timely, scheduling time was cut in half, down from 300 hours to between 100 and 150 hours.

This freed up weeks of capacity that the school team could reinvest into providing student support. The 2025 cycle was completed in approximately four and a half weeks, with the final schedule delivered to the data team on June 18, compared to August 13 the prior year.

Better Outcomes for Students

In the final year before Timely, the district’s SIS could generate complete schedules for roughly half of Salem’s students. With Timely, that figure reached 90%. The students who remain unscheduled are those with genuinely irresolvable conflicts, not casualties of a clunky tool.

Not only were the schedules complete, but they reflected what students actually requested. By building the schedule around course requests rather than rolling over the previous year’s scheduling and only accommodating requests that happened to fit, first-choice course request fulfillment reached 92%

The shift from a fixed-section model to a student-driven one has been profound. As Burns explains: “When people say, ‘What period does this course run?’ I say: it doesn’t. It doesn’t work that way until your kids select it. Then we’ll see what period it runs.”

True Inclusion Learning

Perhaps the most significant outcome has been in special education. Salem moved from a consult model, in which special educators checked in with students a few times per week, to full inclusion, with co-teachers present in core classes every day.

The constraints Timely enforces allowed the district to cap the number of multilingual students and students with IEPs per section so that services were distributed across the schedule rather than clustering them. This had never been possible when they were scheduling by hand. 

Sousa, who holds special education certification and has scheduled across multiple districts in Massachusetts, was direct: “This is the first time, in any district I’ve worked with, that we have successfully built true inclusion classes. That can’t happen in our SIS. It ends up tracking kids. To have only five level-one MLLs in a class and not go above that number, to have true inclusion that didn’t track students, I’ve never seen that in any district I’ve ever consulted with or worked in.”

The downstream effects have been measurable. Students with disabilities at Salem now have the highest MCAS score of any Gateway City high school in Massachusetts and Salem ranked 18th statewide in math growth and 20th in English growth, out of all high schools in the state.

Student Engagement and Retention

When students get the schedule they asked for, they show up differently. Salem’s dropout rate fell from 2.7% to 1%. Alternative school enrollment dropped from around 60 to just 34 students. AP enrollment grew from the low 20s to 41% of the student body. Over 92% of students now have a four-year plan on file.

At freshman orientation in 2024, only 11 students came to the table to request schedule changes, compared to the typical 50 to 60. And the students who did show up were there for legitimate academic reasons, not because they had spent the summer finding out where their friends landed and lobbying for a new period. As Burns noted, when schedules go out early, the school can hold a firm line: schedule changes happen based on academic need, not social preference.

For the first time, AP students received their summer work assignments before school let out, knowing which courses they had actually been placed in. Getting schedules out before summer begins means students can plan, prepare, and start the year ready.

For Burns and the leadership team at Salem Public Schools, the work is far from over, but the trajectory is clear. A school that ranked in the 14th percentile in 2021 is now the highest-performing Gateway City high school in Massachusetts. Students with disabilities and multilingual learners who were once tracked into lower-quality course experiences now produce the state’s best outcomes in their category.

That transformation reflects years of deliberate work: new leadership, stronger programming, and a staff aligned around a shared vision for students. This progress isn’t a result of scheduling alone — but without a schedule that could operationalize those priorities across nearly 1,000 students, dozens of constraints, and a structure more complex than almost any other school in the state, none of it could have been executed at scale.