“Three days worth of work. What you just did, in seven seconds.” – TJ Salopek Principal | South Fayette High School
the challenge
South Fayette High School sits in a Pittsburgh suburb with roughly 1,060 students in grades 9–12. With increasing budget pressure, the rich programming offered by the school was becoming harder to schedule in a manner that preserved consistent student access. Among the various constraints and priorities the school navigate are:
- a partnership with an offsite CTE institute
- shared teachers across buildings
- science lab room requirements
- 42 AP courses
- three-period lunch rotations
- a weekly Wednesday flex period
For years, building the master schedule fell entirely to the principal’s office. The complex combination of course offerings and student support needs meant the schedule had to be built from scratch every year, by hand — their existing tools simply couldn’t handle it. Before the broader schedule could even begin, roughly 140 students with IEPs and specialized placement needs required individual hand-scheduling. Career institute students had to be locked into the first three periods of the day with a mandatory fourth-period lunch for transportation, shared staff had narrow availability windows, AP courses and lab rooms collided, and room utilization drove decisions as much as student need.
As principal Natasha Dirda put it: “When you solve one problem, you create five others.” The need for a modern scheduling solution was clear, and made even more urgent by the fact that Dr. Dirda would be transitioning to a new role as Assistant Superintendent at Mount Lebanon School District.
the solution
Dr. Dirda understood that the problem was primed for technology. “The use of artificial intelligence can do what what it takes me hours, days, weeks, months… it’s just the manpower that it takes to input, run iterations. That’s the biggest barrier.”
South Fayette partnered with Timely with two clear goals: save time and build a better schedule that maximized student access to the courses they wanted and needed.
Timely integrated directly with South Fayette’s PowerSchool SIS through an automated daily data sync. Timely’s school success team worked with incoming principal TJ Salopek and outgoing principal Dr. Dirda through weekly coaching sessions during the scheduling season. South Fayette’s scheduling parameters captured every constraint that had previously made the schedule so difficult to build: period locks for career institute students, special education inclusion stacks, the three-lunch rotation, double-block AP labs, and a hard rule against assigning any teacher three or more consecutive instructional periods. The Timely platform built staff and student schedules honoring all of these constraints.
Principal Salopek described the partnership as unlike anything he’d experienced before: “The way in which you have treated us and made our team feel and welcomed us from day one is truly special and different from the majority of what we get to experience. Just an absolute breath of fresh air.”
results
South Fayette finished its first season with Timely having met 97% of core course requests across more than 1,000 students, without a single teacher having to teach more than three periods in a row. Career institute and special education students who had previously required individual hand-scheduling were automatically placed into the correct courses. The manual work that once consumed every scheduling season was gone.
The time savings showed up in other ways too. When Timely configured the three-period lunch rotation live on a coaching call, a task that had previously taken days, Salopek put it plainly: “Three days worth of work. What you just did, in seven seconds.”
LOOKING AHEAD
South Fayette plans to bring counselors into the scheduling process earlier so they can take on the final-mile hand-scheduling that truly complex student situations require. And with the hard work of configuring the schedule’s constraints already done, much of that foundation carries directly into next year, making each subsequent season faster to set up than the last.
Salopek is already thinking several moves ahead: “I’m already thinking of things for next year — how we block in those 3 periods in a row, the [CTE institute], some of our really unique special ed situations. We could be rolling weeks and weeks ahead of schedule.” Dr. Dirda, now in her new role at Mount Lebanon, reflected on the partnership with equal enthusiasm: “I’m 20 years into public ed and partnered with a lot of different organizations. It was first class across the board.”
