Scheduling Nightmare

Let's have an honest conversation about building schedules.

Did just reading that give you that feeling in your stomach? That pit of anxiety and stress welling up inside of you. Yes. That word can cause that effect for many people. Me, definitely being one of them.

When I started this job a year ago, I inherited a building schedule. I found the format it was created in impossible to read/follow. I'm such a visual person and *this* made my skin itch.

Yep. That is just the *start* of the multiple tabs showing the schedule in different ways. There was not just a one-page view to see it all at a glance. I had to flip between multiple tabs to try to figure out when people needed to be where. My *visual* brain was in overload, and I simply had a hard time looking at it, nonetheless, using it.

At the time, I was told to run with it, take notes, and plan to make changes for the following year. In hindsight, it was the best advice possible, as it allowed me to see things in action. I could not have *fixed* it or improved upon it last summer, when I hadn't seen a full year in the school. And, in truth, it is not that the schedule, itself, was awful at all. There were many parts of it that worked really well for staff. Reading it was just a beast.

So, towards the end of this year, I went on a mission to tackle this puzzle.

If any of you have ever taken on a building schedule, you can empathize with what a nightmare it actually is. We have 600 kids. I have 100 staff members. I have traveling teachers. I have a special that only falls once, every other week. I have grades 4-6 that have a different amount of specials than K-3 does. I also have multi-age teachers that teach 3/4! It was the worst kind of jigsaw puzzle.

So, I began with collecting feedback from my staff. I sent out a "hopes and dreams" Google Form, asking for their input.

That led to pages and pages of a spreadsheet responses to sift through. Many admitted that they did not have perfect solutions, but many of their requests/needs were understandable. The hard part is that not all could be perfectly honored. 

My main priorities were:

• 3 clean lunch/recess hours (this would be down from 5 different start times last year)
• Common planning time for single age teachers--EVERYDAY
• Common planning time for our multi-age partners to meet with their teaching partner DAILY, and with their age-group counter parts, multiple times per week
• Art at the end of the day for all 5th & 6th grade teachers due to an amazing partnership happening next year with a local art university
• Adding in an extra "guided study" (Intervention block" for our multi-age 1/2 students due to number of students in need

I needed to set the lunch hours first. The rest of the day would be built around that. 

Then, I moved on to a blank, visual slate.

I made a weekly template with my traveling teachers time blocked off. I also took into consideration our early release schedule on Wednesdays, as well as our "crew" time in our building (morning meetings, culture building time). I then printed this on legal-sized paper, so it was nice and big to scribble all over. Keeping my teacher's input and my priorities in mind, I started penciling things in.

I honestly think I went through about 15-20 different iterations of this hot mess. I'd get so far, then realize a mistake that threw everything off, and I'd have to erase a ton or simply start with a fresh sheet. But, being a visual person, it worked well for me. That being said, I quickly needed to upgrade my eraser ;)

I also made a page that showed exactly how many of each special each teacher needed each week. I checked them off, as I scheduled them. This allowed me to double check my work along the way, making sure I had enough for everyone.

I picked the project up and put it down countless times. It was a labor of....well...SOMETHING! ;) Certainly *NOT* a labor of love! Your brain can only handle so much, and then you felt like you were going to pitch the entire thing out the front window. But, eventually, I felt like I had a working iteration. At that point, I began filling in color-coded cells. A color for each grade level or teaching partnership set. 

Once I triple checked my work, I then created individual spreadsheets for each grade level. This allowed me to plug their "non-moveable items" into a week at a glance. This was critical for me, as it let me ensure that they all had large enough blocks of time to teach in. I remember being in the classroom and having weird 15 minute windows here or there, which broke up your day in odd ways. You couldn't really do much with those windows of time, and it impacted many things. I wanted to reduce that as much as possible for the teachers. 

I found many things to *tweak* by laying it out this way. I, then, fine-tuned the final schedule even more. The other benefit of this layout, is now my teachers can simply "plug in" what they are doing the rest of the blocks. I set permissions on each grade level tab so only they (and I) can edit their sheet. It then gives the entire building everyone's weekly schedules at a glance!

The final step, of course, was to share it with the staff. So far, only one minor error that was quickly resolved. Here's to hoping that it is an improvement for next year!

How do you do the building schedule? Have you tried those fancy online subscriptions, or do you complete it "old school" like me? Would love to learn from you!

Yours in Scheduling,

Angela