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On 3/09/14, Claire Gatti wrote:
> I have a fairly big school PK-8 with 2 classes of each. Can
> you recommend a program to produce schedules for 20
> classrooms including specials? It is a nightmare each year
> to create a schedule that works for everyone.

A computer program is never going to produce a schedule
that "works for everyone" - there are too many human factors
involved, and in a large school, even a computer-produced
schedule does still have conflicts that will have to be worked
out by hand.
Our student information program includes a feature that will
alert us to schedule conflicts. (We are a high school with
nearly a hundred classrooms and teachers, each with six
classes daily, so this is a rather different situation from
yours.) Even so, we do the initial master schedule by hand on
a huge board in the office. By the time it gets into the
student information system, we've already worked out a lot of
the scheduling issues and ideally have kept the conflicts to a
minimum. The best strategy I know of it is use the current
year (or a previous year, if a previous year was better for
some reason) as a starting point or "template". If you can
replicate a similar schedule from year to year, you're less
likely to have scheduling problems than you will if you start
from scratch each time.

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