Texas school districts entered the 2025-26 school year under compounding pressure. Inflation had risen more than 20% in recent years while state revenues remained largely flat, and an estimated 70% of districts across the state faced budget reductions. For most, that raised the same hard question: when cuts are unavoidable, how do you make them precisely enough to protect what matters?

Texarkana ISD needed to find $3.5 to $4 million in savings, and with 82% of its budget dedicated to payroll, the path forward ran through personnel.

Anita Clay, the district’s Chief Financial Officer, was committed to finding those savings with precision. Texarkana runs two complex secondary campuses serving nearly 3,000 students across hundreds of courses, CTE programs, and support structures. Clay saw the opportunity in finding positions the schedule no longer justified, but she lacked the data to know where.

The challenge was visibility. Middle school and high school administrators set section counts and staffed positions independently, with no means to share that data with central leadership. “You just don’t know what you don’t know. We’ve done scheduling the way we’ve done scheduling forever. I do think that we are not seeing the full picture,” says Clay.

Amanda Eisley, the district’s Director of Student Information Services, had managed master scheduling for 17 years. “There were times we printed off sheets of paper with the course and section name, spread them out on a huge conference table, and moved them all around,” she says. Their SIS scheduling tool was an improvement from the manual era, but it still gave schedulers only one chance to draft a schedule. What came out was what you worked with. No iteration, no second look, no way to ask: what if we did this differently?

Texarkana ISD partnered with Timely Schools to build schedules for the 2026-27 school year.

Clay set a deliberately modest goal. She wanted to get the tool in front of schedulers and let them learn it. If Timely surfaced even a single FTE of savings, it more than paid for itself. “My goal in the very beginning was just to get it in the hands of the campuses. The only goal I had was to give them the tool. Everything on top of that was icing,” she says. That low-stakes framing gave schedulers room to build familiarity with the system before any pressure to shift their staffing.

Timely paired each campus with a scheduling expert for coaching throughout the season, with additional district-level support to guide alignment between school and district leaders. For the first time, campus schedulers and district leadership worked from the same data. Timely’s platform mapped section counts against actual course demand, giving schedulers the context to understand why changes mattered and giving central office a view it had never had before.

Schools tested different configurations and progressively tightened the schedule. Timely’s optimization engine also handled the structural complexity that had always made Texarkana’s scheduling hard: shared teachers between both campuses, coaches with blocked periods, inclusion placement and co-teaching assignments, CTE course sequencing, and AP and dual-credit singletons at the high school.

Texarkana finished the season with a clear picture of where its staffing resources were going.

The district identified five FTE positions that could be reinvested into district priorities, far exceeding the original goal to recover Timely’s cost through a single FTE’s worth of savings. “We blew that out of the water,” says Ben Renner, Chief of Secondary Schools.

The student experience was preserved throughout this process. At the middle school, the district met 99% of all core requests. The teacher teaming process, which had previously required manually coding students into course sections, ran dramatically faster with Timely’s cohort import tool. At the high school, the district met 97% of all core requests. The schedule preserved core subjects, CTE sequences, and programs of study throughout.

“We really needed the help this year, and it’s made a difference,” says Superintendent Dr. Doug Brubaker.