Timely+Case+Study+Final+(2)

 Using the School Schedule To Improve
Special Education Instructional Delivery
         & Staffing Efficiencies

 How Richardson Independent School District and Mesquite Independent School
 District leveraged the master schedule to improve delivery of special education
                  instruction while enhancing staffing efficiencies
Executive Summary

               “It is critical with special education staffing, especially with how our budget is,
               to find a way to serve kids effectively and in the most efficient way possible”
                – Brandon Musgrove, Director, Mesquite ISD (and former academic counselor)

Designing quality, dedicated, and individualized support for special education and emergent bilingual
students (or multilingual learners) presents significant challenges for school districts, made even more
complicated by budget pressure. One of the most critical components of special education planning is
the development of the master schedule based on specific student needs and the availability of learning
specialists while integrating with general education classes. Legal and compliance mandates with
individualized education plans (IEPs) add to the degree of difficulty faced by district and charter leaders.

What’s more, federal data shows that 21% of public
schools were not fully staffed in special education
at the start of the 2023-2024 school year1—higher
levels of reported shortages than any other
teaching specialty. Districts across the country are
concerned about the churn of teachers moving in
and out of special education roles, looming teacher
retirements, and positions left unfilled due to a lack
of candidates or funding.

Two Texas districts — Richardson Independent
School District and Mesquite Independent School
District — partnered with Timely and leveraged
strategic scheduling to tackle these and other
unique challenges for their special populations.

Rather than developing schedules for special
education and emergent bilingual (EB) students
manually and separately from the master
scheduling process, a common practice that can
lead to significant inefficiencies, both Richardson
and Mesquite partnered with Timely, leveraging its
AI optimization technology, to proactively build
improved, efficient schedules for students and staff.




National Center for Education Statistics
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As a result, these two districts achieved goals they previously weren’t able to accomplish:


 Staffing Efficiencies

  Both Richardson ISD and Mesquite ISD increased staffing efficiencies for their special education
  teachers, significantly reducing the risk of inevitable hiring needs driven by attrition or an influx of new
  students.

  Mesquite ISD, which implemented a pilot with Timely across two middle schools in 2023-24, identified,
  on average, an excess of 2.0 FTEs of special education teachers at each campus. This means if more
  students with IEPs enroll during the school year, they could serve those students with existing staff. Or, if
  there were a staff separation (e.g., retirement, resignation), they could continue meeting student needs
  with the remaining teachers.


 Better Delivery of Services

  Learning specialists are less likely to be stretched across content areas. Instead, there is a greater
  dedication of learning specialists within their content expertise, allowing teachers to become more
  familiar with student learning needs while providing support as indicated by the IEP.


 Time Savings

     Richardson and Mesquite were able to finalize their schedules in a fraction of the time – on average,
     both districts saved 50-100 hours per campus compared to prior years. For many administrators and
     counselors, this is the equivalent of getting their summer back!


               Saved 50-100 hours per campus




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Why Scheduling Matters

Scheduling is one of the most complex responsibilities of a school system. It's no wonder school leaders
struggle to develop schedules within their already constrained time and resources. And their counterparts
within central offices are often not equipped to support them nor have visibility into the staffing and
budget implications of the master schedule.



             “It’s honestly one of the hardest things we have to do every year.”
             – District Chief Academic Officer

Yet, as evidenced by Richardson and Mesquite
Independent School Districts, scheduling shouldn’t
be a process district and school leaders suffer
through, but rather one that enables academic,
staffing, and budget priorities.

The school schedule reflects values and priorities.
With 75 to 85% of a district budget dedicated to
personnel, there are few questions more paramount
than how your staff and students spend their time
every day, how many teachers you will hire, and how
students will interact with them. Equitable resource
allocation across schools, proper access to core
courses and electives, and dedicated support to
sub-groups begin with the development of a school
schedule. And perhaps the most overlooked aspect
of scheduling is the ability to develop innovative
staffing and budgeting solutions.

There are often significant inefficiencies within a school schedule, particularly in middle and high schools.
Perhaps the biggest driver of these inefficiencies is the common practice of simply rolling over the prior
year’s schedule. This is an understandable approach given it’s the path of least resistance, but over time it
can inadvertently calcify both inefficiencies and inequities.

Often, student course offerings don't align with the needs and requests of students, there is an overall
mismatch of resources across schools, certain classes are under-enrolled while others are
over-subscribed, and students from historically marginalized groups can be disproportionately impacted.
As a result, schools may find themselves unintentionally allocating resources in a manner that goes against
their own goals and objectives, with the lowest class sizes in advanced classes, electives, and/or upper
grades.



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In order to address these complexities, it’s critical that schools build a ground-up schedule predicated on
student needs. And in order to build strategic schedules, education leaders need both support and more
sophisticated implementation tools that are powered by technology.

In a report by the Center for Public Leadership and Research (CPRL) at Columbia University, researchers
write:

             “The master schedule, an undoubtedly strategic tool, gets treated as a logistical
             one. This has disastrous consequences for students because it (1) masks the
             weight of the choices at hand, and (2) limits what is possible.

             In every case, the shift from technical to strategic scheduling was
             accompanied by a shift from limited to more sophisticated tools. As schools and
             systems sought to do more with their schedules, they stumbled over difficult-to-use tools
             and were pushed to find alternatives."

In other words, current solutions – clunky SIS-embedded schedulers, messy spreadsheets, whiteboards,
magnet tiles – are insufficient. Education leaders, by accessing sophisticated, technology-enabled tools
and support, can leverage strategic scheduling to address critical priorities with student achievement,
staffing, and budgeting.




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Mesquite ISD

Like many districts across the country, Mesquite Independent School District (ISD) experienced a growing
population of students with disabilities and resulting demand for special education support. Historically,
creating inclusion classes proved technically challenging and was often siloed and relegated to the latter
stages of the scheduling process due to its complicated nature. Consequently, there were significant
inefficiencies in how students and staff were assigned throughout the year leading to inconsistent teacher
caseloads with diverse student needs and a high potential for teacher burnout. Additionally, Mesquite, like
so many other school districts, struggled to recruit, hire and retain special education teachers. Thus, the
prospect of teacher retirements loomed large as any reduction in staff would wreak havoc on staffing.

             “Anything we can do to maximize special education resources is a win. A win for
             our administration, for our staff, and most importantly, for our students.” –
             Valerie Mayad, Executive Director of Administrative Services & Data
             Management

Before Timely, Mesquite ISD built their inclusion classes
as a separate process alongside the overall master
schedule development. “We would be using a piece of
paper and pencil trying to slot in our students with an
IEP into pre-existing sections we created through the
master schedule process,” said Valerie Mayad, who
oversees the scheduling process.

After assembling a cross-functional implementation
team, Mesquite ISD proactively created their total
inclusion sections, a cap for the number of students
with an IEP in each section, and assigned co-teachers
before the master schedule was developed. Timely’s
optimization technology then generated a master
schedule based on these unique constraints. This
ultimately allowed students to be grouped strategically
to support their needs articulated in the IEP while also
meeting compliance requirements.

And, critically, Mesquite ISD was able to identify, on
average, an excess of 2.0 FTEs of special education
teachers per participating campus. As a result, the
district is now in a significantly better position to
support both current and future students.




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If each school were to receive new students during this school year, they could serve them with existing
staff. And given the challenges with retention of special education, if a school were to lose a special
education teacher to retirement or resignation, they would still be able to serve their students without
needing to scramble and hire a new teacher.

“There’s a huge shortage of teachers, particularly special education,” said Valerie Mayad. “And because of
strategic scheduling with Timely, we are now in a better position with this high-need staffing position.”

What’s more, the Mesquite school-based scheduling teams were able to build a master schedule that led
to (1) a significantly higher percentage of students fully scheduled, and (2) substantial time savings in the
process.



Better Schedules
  Before Timely, the lead scheduler (an academic counselor) at participating schools would, on average,
  get their students to ~70% fully scheduled before hand-scheduling. And with Timely, they achieved
  >90%.



Time Savings
  Before Timely, on average, each participating school would typically spend between 125 to 175 hours on
  scheduling each year. And with Timely, they were able to save 75 to 100 hours, per participating school
  throughout the scheduling process.




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Richardson ISD

In 2021, the Richardson Independent School District (ISD) Board of Trustees approved a shift to
transition from junior high schools (which serve grades 7 to 9) to a middle school model (grades 6 to 8),
aligning with 95% of Texas districts. This decision was driven by the need to address overcrowded
classrooms due to a growing elementary population, and to expand opportunities in academics, fine
arts, and athletics. The transition also offered high potential for cost savings by consolidating junior high
and elementary campuses.

However, it also introduced complex scheduling challenges for both general and special populations, such
as course offerings, staffing and resource allocation, and space utilization, making efficient resource
management and strategic teacher planning vital.

And critical to this grade-level transition was how the district would accommodate its special education
and emergent bilingual students.

             “When scheduling, we would build special education independently - it was
             siloed when it shouldn’t have been.”
             – Summer Martin, Executive Director of Counseling & Prevention Services
             (oversees the district’s scheduling process)

Summer Martin, Richardson ISD’s leader of the master scheduling process, describes how special
education inclusion classes and those serving emergent bilingual (EB) students were created after the
master schedule was already developed. She states, “Once we fit the general education classes (by
department) into the master schedule, we would look at special education and EB students along with
staffing and see where we can fit them into available sections. You end up with students and staff being
too spread out. There was no rhyme or reason to these schedules.”

Thanks to Timely’s AI optimization technology, Richardson ISD has, for the first time, strategically built
inclusion classes that are optimized to ensure both efficient staffing and effective service delivery. As a
result, students are more likely to be served by learning specialists in their content specialty as opposed
to teachers providing services across multiple content areas, allowing teachers to become more familiar
with student learning needs while providing support as indicated by the IEP.




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Conclusion
Through the use of strategic scheduling, the Richardson and Mesquite Independent School Districts
significantly revamped their staffing and delivery of instruction for special education and emergent
bilingual students. As a result, they were able to build schedules that created efficiency and coherence in
how learning specialists were assigned to students.

Critically, this shift to strategic scheduling required a partnership with Timely, a technology-enabled
implementation tool that helped enable these two districts’ priorities.

Researchers from the Center for Public Leadership and Research (CPRL) state: "The master schedule, an
undoubtedly strategic [process], gets treated as a logistical one. This has disastrous consequences for
students because it (1) masks the weight of the choices at hand, and (2) limits what is possible."

This report aims to showcase how the leadership of Richardson and Mesquite Independent School
Districts, through their careful and intentional partnership with Timely, are exemplars of how to utilize
strategic scheduling as a vehicle to improve the delivery of instruction to special populations.




About



 About Timely: Timely is your home for                                About Mesquite Independent School
   middle and high school scheduling                                  District: Mesquite Independent School
featuring AI optimization technology and                                District is located in Texas, serving
 support from a team of educators who                                 more than 38,000 students across 52
    know and have lived scheduling.                                     schools, led by Superintendent Dr.
                                                                                     Angel Rivera.




 About Richardson Independent School                                   About The Commit Partnership: The
District: Richardson Independent Schools                                Commit Partnership is a collective
    District is located in Texas, serving                                 impact nonprofit organization
 36,900 students across 50 schools, led                                dedicated to improving educational
   by Superintendent Tabitha Barnum.                                       outcomes for Dallas County.




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