Customer Feedback

We received this email on Tuesday, July 01, 2003 from Gary Miller (Assistant Principal, Oak Park High School, North Kansas City School District, Kansas City, MO). He gave us permission to reprint the whole email.

Steve: I want to give you my feedback on our first year using the Schedule Optimizer. We have finished our schedules for the 2003-2004 school year and are very pleased with your product. Our school serves approximately 1900 students in grades 9-12. A few additional facts will give you a feel for the complexity of our schedule:

• About 200 of our students are classified with disabilities of some sort. Most of these students have must be scheduled in one or more special course settings.
• We schedule all of our courses by semester. However, about 3/4 of our courses combine across the two semesters to create full-year courses with the restriction that students must be scheduled with the same instructor.
• We offer 407 courses. 212 of them are singletons or doubletons. (A large number of the singleton/doubleton courses are special ed.)
• All of our core courses have honors versions. Most of these honors courses have 2-3 sections.
• We schedule many of special ed students in "CWC" classes. These are specific sections of regular core courses in which we staff a second teacher to reduce the student/teacher ratio.
• Approximately 200 of our 444 seniors have requested part-time schedules and have blocked out portions of their school days accordingly.
• 100 of our 463 freshmen are schedule on a team with common teachers and sections for their four core classes.

Given all of the above challenges, we ended up with an 89% schedule rate. Actually, however, I believe the rate is closer to 92-94%. This is due to the part-time schedules for our seniors. We will override the conflicts created by their part-time requests as we fix schedules by hand, and therefore do not consider these bad schedules to be conflicted even though the system does. Our class by class stats were as follows:

9th = 96%

10th = 97%

11th = 91%

12th = 71% (counting part-time conflicts as bad schedules)

This is by far the best schedule rate I have ever been able to achieve, and I am convinced that much of the success is due to the Optimizer. The Sched Pro Loader achieved a 71% run on the same master schedule. (To be fair, however, I set up Sched Pro to work with the Optimizer. There are a few parameters that I could have adjusted to improve the Sched Pro run.)

I especially like the Section Load Restriction override feature in the Optimizer. This allowed me to schedule my special ed CWC classes with special ed students assigned first to the designated CWC sections of our core courses. Once the special ed students were scheduled, the Optimizer then filled the remaining seats in these sections with regular ed students. I have had to use all sorts of work-arounds to achieve this end in the past, always resulting in unbalanced total section numbers.

I also liked the enhanced Must/Try feature. I did not use this for very many situations, but it did result in an additional 31 students scheduling correctly for the few situations in which I used it.

Your new master schedule grids in the the 5.05 beta version are excellent. I am able to copy the entire "Printer Friendly Version" into a Word file, and publish it for my staff in one step. I appreciate the fact the you have added the option to remove section load statistics from this grid since publishing these numbers can incite a certain amount of conflict with our teaching staff.

You have provided me with excellent feedback on proper use of the Optimizer, and your online and e-mail support has been excellent. Every single question I asked was resolved to my satisfaction quite promptly. I really appreciate this!

Overall, the scheduling and balancing design of the Optimizer clearly outperformed the equivalent processes in Sched Pro, and Sched Pro is a good product.

I do have a couple of suggestions for improvement which I will offer. They are as follows:

• The Section Load Restriction override process might be improved a bit with more attention paid to balancing the students who are allocated to specific sections. I found the number of special ed students assigned to CWC sections of courses using this process to be a bit unbalanced. I'm not sure if the Optimizer looks at this or if the unbalanced numbers are occurring due to the fact CWC sections effectively turn these courses into singleton/doubleton offerings for special ed students.
• Please consider adding an option to remove the Max (Capacity) number from your Master Schedule Grids. I often manipulate this number for particular scheduling reasons. Teachers and others who look at the published grids don't understand this, and I prefer not to have to explain.

Those are the only two suggestions, and they are both minor. The Optimizer has performed beyond my expectations, and your support has been great. Again, thank you for your help this scheduling season and for a product that works!

Gary Miller, Assistant Principal, Oak Park High School, North Kansas City School District, Kansas City, MO

Note from Steve

Both of these suggestions from Gary have been addressed. We now have a writeup about Balancing a Student Group and Maximum Capacity is not displayed on the "No Fill" version of the Master Schedule Grids report (available in beta 5.05).

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