• Preserved Course Access Despite Cuts: SBHS achieved 99% fulfillment of core course requests while successfully absorbing a 10-FTE reduction and maintaining the richness and integrity of all course offerings and specialized programs.
• Massive Efficiency Gain: The counseling team reported this was their easiest year yet for hand-scheduling, saving hundreds of hours of manual work and ensuring students were fully scheduled before the first day of school.
• Reinvestment in Student Outcomes: Counselors reclaimed time from fixing schedules to invest in high-value work that directly impacts students, including advising, post-secondary planning, and social-emotional support.

Shifting Demographics and Increasing Operational Complexity

Santa Barbara USD has experienced significant demographic change over the past decade. Enrollment at Santa Barbara High School (SBHS) dropped 15% from its peak (2,112 students) to 1,800 students in the 25-26 school year, a loss that forced difficult decisions about staffing and resources.

While overall enrollment declined, the composition of the student body shifted dramatically. Students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds increased from 48% to 62%, bringing with them greater need for targeted interventions, co-taught classes, and English language support.

At the same time, the school remained committed to maintaining its rich academic portfolio: 20+ Advanced Placement courses, 32 dual enrollment sections, seven CTE pathways, and specialized academies including the Media Arts and Design Academy (MAD) and Visual Arts and Design Academy (VADA) programs. 

The operational foundation made this even more complex. The school uses a 4×4 block schedule but faces a core conflict:

• Union Rule: Teachers can have a maximum of 90 students per quarter.
• Class Capacity: Each class section can hold up to 35 students.

Since a teacher instructs three sections per quarter, three full sections (3 x 35) would result in 105 students, exceeding the 90-student cap. This incompatibility meant that every time an imbalance occurred, it required manual rebalancing, a time-intensive process that typically consumed hundreds of counselor hours each year.

Compounding these structural complexities was the fact that the scheduling process relied on practices inherited over decades, with no systematic way to determine which constraints were truly nonnegotiable and which were simply institutional traditions or staff preferences.

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:

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.

Better schedules in less time

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.”

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 parameters 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.