Creating a school master schedule is often a time-consuming and headache-inducing endeavor. It’s hard for school leadership to get it just right because of the myriad factors that must be taken into account—including teacher certifications, class sizes, and student accommodations.
Then, the final schedule isn’t always as efficient as it could be, with redundancies that cost schools money, said Jolene Bruce, the director of student data services for the Austin independent school district.
That’s why her Texas district—where the board of trustees decided last month to close 10 schools in the face of a budget deficit—has started to use artificial intelligence to craft its 33 middle and high school master schedules. The district piloted the technology in select schools in the 2024-25 school year, and used the technology district-wide this year.
So far, using AI to build efficient school schedules has significantly reduced the administrative burden, saving the district about $2,600 per campus, Bruce said. But the district expects larger cost savings as it continues to refine the schedules with AI.
In many ways, schedule building is a natural fit for AI-powered technology—so long as schools are diligent in its use. The U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights warned in a report last year against over-relying on AI in administrative tasks and not keeping real people in the decisionmaking loop.
EdWeek spoke with Bruce about her district’s experience so far in using AI to create school schedules, following Bruce’s presentation on the subject during a recent summit on AI hosted by AASA, The School Superintendents Association. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did your district decide to try using AI to revamp class scheduling?
I started [at Austin ISD] last fall, and we were under two different [internal] audits. There were major discrepancies being found in the secondary master scheduling, so that’s our middle school and high school campuses. [The audits] found that we could have a tremendous amount of budget savings if we would make those schedules efficient and standard across the board.
In Austin, most of the campuses have teachers teaching six out of eight periods. It was really drilling down and looking at how we could maximize our teacher capacity.
We partnered with Timely [a company that built a tool that] uses generative AI to help us find those discrepancies so we could see which teachers didn’t have a full load, or which teachers could be used more effectively teaching additional classes.
What is an example of an inefficiency you found?
People were being utilized as almost pseudo admin roles. They were doing instructional walks [visiting other teachers’ classrooms to give feedback] or mentoring, for example. The district was trying to find a way to track and manage that—making sure that if they were using teachers in that [way], was it increasing student outcomes?
We wanted to know if that return on investment was worth the time not spent teaching a class.
How did AI help solve this efficiency problem?
Say I’m in a middle school. I’m going to tell Timely: We’re going to have periods one through eight, and I want my class size to be 25 kids per class. And I want to set up constraints like, I want my language arts teachers to all have off second period so they can have common PLC planning time. You plug in all the different formulaic constraints that you want and the AI will generate a schedule.
It will sort kids. It can keep kids that shouldn’t be together away from each other, it’ll help make sure that classes are balanced [with special and general education students], and then you can look at it and dig deeper and keep refining it until you get a really efficient master schedule.
Then there’s a one-time upload of that finished schedule ... to the student information system.
How much time did using AI save your school leaders?
Most of our schedulers would spend quite a bit of their summer trying to refine and finish the schedule. It’s very limited in working on those constraints that I was talking about. It’s not quick, and you have to basically do it by hand and keep checking lists, and there’s a lot of opportunity for human error.
On average, using Timely last year, it saved [principals and their scheduling team] at least 50 hours. And the feedback that we got from those schedulers was that it increased their job satisfaction. They were so excited they got their summer back. They felt like they could actually manage master scheduling, and the master scheduling wasn’t managing them.
Is it easy for people to make mistakes when juggling all of those considerations?
Yes. None of it is with ill will, right?
My first master schedule that I made, we had a huge magnetic whiteboard and we would put magnets on a board to figure out who’s teaching what when. You have to go through papers and look at everybody’s schedules. How many kids can we put in this class? If somebody walked in the room and looked at the magnet board, most people wouldn’t understand what they were looking at.
You have to look at certifications. You can’t have one class completely filled with students who need accommodations, you have to have a decent balance—… a certain percentage of students that are in special education, another percentage that’s on 504 plans, another percentage that’s emergent bilingual. Research has shown time and time again how important it is to have that balance so students can learn from each other and grow academically.
Why should school and district leaders take a hard look at their scheduling processes now?
Across the nation, we’re seeing a decrease of student enrollment in our schools—which we know that’s how schools get funding, is enrollment and attendance—coupled with, since COVID, the increase of students needing extra support, even if they don’t qualify as someone with a special education disability or a 504 disability. We are facing really hard challenges because we have to do less with more. To me, it’s logical to use tools to help us do better to ensure that students have a well-resourced school and schedule.
Honestly, 80% of your budget is spent from your master schedule. If you can make your master schedule efficient, you’re going to find major cost savings there.
