School Master Scheduler
Every school year, preparing schedules for courses, classrooms, teachers and students is one of the most important tasks school site administrators carry out. The underlying goal of producing an optimum master schedule is to provide students the best education experience possible by achieving the maximum utilization of School District resources.
Preparing Secondary School schedules for classes, teachers and students is an enormous if not daunting exercise due to the sheer magnitude of data, options, constraints priorities and preferences that should be considered during the scheduling process. If all prerequisites for building a schedule are properly deliberated, millions of possible combinations could be considered before processing down to an optimum master schedule.
The time-honored way of putting together new school year master schedules is primarily by editing and revising the previous school year’s master schedule. This method of building school master schedules usually incorporates the use of spreadsheet templates, white board matrixes and post-its making the process mostly manual therefore very time consuming. Producing and evaluating a variety of new scheduling models with traditional methods is impractical due to the substantial amount of administration time it takes to build them.
The iSIMS School Master Scheduler is a true schedule generator that functions mainly as an automated process. Entirely new master schedules can be run in seconds making iSIMS very effective for producing and evaluating various new scheduling models. The iSIMS School Master Scheduler is a rules-based, data-driven application that generates school master schedules via a two stage process. Stage one schedules courses, rooms and teachers and stage two schedules students. Stage one uses a student tally model and would typically be run before stage two thereby making stage one schedules available to administrators at an earlier date for planning and budgetary purposes. Second stage scheduling would be run at a later date once the actual student enrollment is available.
The first stage considers user defined constraints, preferences and priorities regarding courses, classrooms and teachers. Required data pertaining to base schedule (days, periods, etc.), student tally, courses, class rooms and teachers can be imported either from existing District information systems or the data can be entered and maintained in the iSIMS application. Once the data is available, the Master Scheduler generates schedules for Teachers, Courses, and Rooms.
Second stage student schedule processing is run after course, room and teacher schedules are planned and actual student enrollments are available. The School Master Scheduler prepares individual student schedules by matching course requests and requirements for each student to the master schedule of course and class offerings. In this stage user defined priorities and constraints regarding student scheduling along with student course requirements and requests are taken into account prompting the School Master Scheduler to generate the best possible schedule for each student.
