Defining Strategic Priorities for Scheduling

To begin addressing these challenges, Santa Barbara USD partnered with New Solutions K12, a consulting firm specializing in strategic school schedule design, best practice academic interventions and special education supports, and strategic budgeting practices. This partnership provided a foundational framework to guide strategic decisions for a cohort of SBUSD schools committed to designing more cost-effective school schedules that also aligned with academic and instructional best practices.

Together, they established four core strategic priorities to guide schedules:

• Student-Centered Academic Pathways: Scheduling decisions prioritize students’ college and career readiness over administrative convenience.

• Protected Student Supports: Co-taught IEP sections, English language support placements, content-specific intervention classes, and specialized academy cohorts are prioritized and remain intact regardless of scheduling constraints.

• Precision Staffing: Schedule the 123 active teaching FTE strategically to maximize the reach and impact of each teacher.

• Data-Informed Leadership: Moving beyond 20 years of inherited practice to data-informed decision-making led by a scheduling team of school and district leaders that can adapt to future changes.

These priorities ensured the work was truly strategic and helped the district move beyond the largely technical approach to scheduling it had taken in the past. As Deputy Superintendent Dr. Sonia Wilson noted, the goal was: "to make sure that all of the decisions that we make around the strategic master schedule are really nested in what we value and what we prioritize both at the site level and at the district level. And that really is what makes it strategic because those decisions are all being made around the goals and priorities of the district."

Santa Barbara High School Assistant Principal Mary Ziegler affirmed the value of the initial planning process, sharing that the training helped them "focus our attention on making sure that our master schedule was very student focused, making sure that our teacher effectiveness was reflected... prioritizing our school goals [and] making sure that our students are college and career ready."

Operationalizing Priorities in the Master Schedule

Santa Barbara High School then took the crucial next step by combining this strategic clarity with modern technology. By partnering with Timely, they piloted the use of AI-optimization to execute their priorities within the master schedule.

Timely’s platform layered onto the school's existing Aeries SIS. Nightly syncs pulled scheduling data from Aeries (course requests, students, staff) into a dedicated space in Timely’s platform to experiment, iterate, and optimize the master schedule. With this data, the scheduling team could run dozens of scheduling scenarios with up-to-date information, testing different variables to see downstream impacts on schedule quality. Critically, the platform was optimizing both the full teacher schedule and student enrollments simultaneously, ensuring that satisfying course requests was balanced against the complex set of priorities and scheduling constraints.

Preserving High Standards

Leveraging Timely's precision, the team translated their strategic priorities into concrete scheduling parameters. The platform ensured that:

• AP and Dual Enrollment: Courses remained accessible to all students.

• Program Integrity: Students in the schools two CA Partnership Academies, Media Arts and Design and Visual Arts and Design, maintained strict cohorts essential to their program integrity.

• Contract Compliance: Teacher loads stayed within the 90-student union cap while class sections remained balanced.

• Targeted Support: English language learners received targeted support placements, and students with IEPs received appropriate co-taught section access.

The scheduling process fundamentally shifted. It moved away from manual problem-solving and toward defining a clear set of strategic priorities to guide each school’s scheduling decisions and tradeoffs. This allowed school leaders to focus on high-level strategy while the system handled thousands of complex micro-decisions.

Results

SBHS achieved 99% fulfillment of core course requests and crucially, the school successfully absorbed the 10-teacher reduction while maintaining the richness and integrity of its course offerings and specialized programs.

The most telling metric came directly from the counseling team and Assistant Principal Mary Ziegler. Counselors reported this was their easiest year yet for hand-scheduling, saving hundreds of hours of manual work and ensuring students were ready for the first day of school. Instead of spending time fixing schedules, counselors reclaimed that time to invest in high-value work that directly impacts student outcomes: advising, post-secondary planning, and social-emotional support.

Ziegler detailed the impact, stating, "It saved us hours and hours and hours of time for our counselors having to look at students one by one and hand schedule because Timely has a more powerful optimizer than the current SIS scheduling tool used... using Timely and their optimizer really helped us to get to all of our students' schedules faster and saved us a lot of time and money.”

Key Insights

Santa Barbara High School's experience offers three key pieces of advice for districts and schools navigating budget cuts, staffing reductions, and increased student need:

• Use Technology to Operationalize Strategy: Leaders must define their priorities (e.g., incorporating content-specific interventions, staffing tightly to classroom caps, etc.) and figure out “what” to schedule before building schedules. Then use technology to translate these goals into scheduling conditions and use AI-optimization to build the schedule. This frees up time for leaders to manage change and focus on student needs, rather than manually fitting pieces together.

• Prioritize SIS Enhancement Over Replacement: Look for new tools and technologies that can integrate with your existing Student Information System (SIS), rather than replacing it entirely.

• Make Precision the First Response to Scarcity: In an environment of budget cuts and staffing reductions, the initial conversation should not be about what to cut, but how to become dramatically more efficient to preserve and expand high-quality student opportunities and experiences.

For districts facing enrollment shifts, staffing pressures, and the complexity of serving increasingly high-need student populations, Santa Barbara High School's story serves as a blueprint for response: Modern challenges demand strategic clarity, specialized tools, and the courage to question long-standing practices. The schools that thrive won't be those that cut their way to stability. They'll be the ones that optimize.