How Are Middle School Schedules Made? - A Complicated Process

At the start of the year, when you got your schedules, you may have thought: I’m in six classes with this person! Or: None of my friends are in this class! All middle school students have schedules, but few know how much work goes into creating them.

The process takes a week in June. Before students can be sorted into courses, the schedulers must create the Master Schedule, which has all the courses, but no students. The first step is figuring out “singletons,” classes with only one period. Many other factors are weighed, such as how many grades each teacher can teach, and not having large classes (like choir and band) overlap with others.

Ms. Smallwood first imports student course requirements into Scheduler Prep, a program in Veracross. The program gets about 90% of the schedules correct.

Afterward, the Assistant Middle School Director, formerly Ms. Lewis and currently Ms. Buchanan, edits the schedule. Ms. Ferguson, who used to be the Assistant Director, says “If she is aware of any relationships you have with teachers, or if she just is looking at it, and she's like, huh, actually, I'd like to move [this student] here, because I think their presence in this roster would make it a lively discussion. So there's some movement that happens, but we're not making those decisions every single class. ”

The Old Way

Before the pandemic, the entire scheduling process was done by hand. Ms. Ferguson, recalls when she did the process, “I would buy three … pieces of poster board, and would label sixth, seventh and eighth. And then would map out all of the teachers that were teaching each period.” They would use risk pieces to represent students, and would move them around to test the schedules. “So my whole month of June was just scheduling kids,” says Ms. Ferguson.