Three Steps to a Strategic Schedule

Step 2: Explore Scheduling Strategies 

Designing a strategic master schedule is about prioritizing strategies and making trade-offs to maximize the resources available. As we say, you can do anything, but you can’t do everything.

When designing a school schedule, it's important to fully explore different strategies to determine the time, staffing, and trade-offs needed to make each work.

ERS has worked with districts and individual school teams across the country to design and create school schedules that meet schools’ most important priorities within the context of their available resources. We’ve developed resources and tools to help school and district leaders pressure-test different strategies, model the cost implications, and select the ones that best fit their needs. 

Explore more scheduling resources:

• Power Strategies: five strategies to focus your investments and planning on that will address critical student needs now and lay a sustainable foundation for lasting improvement.
• ESSER Staffing, Spending, and Scheduling Guidebooks: nine guides for how to organize resources with a "Do Now, Build Toward" mindset in key focus areas such as tutoring, credit recovery, professional learning and collaboration, and more.
• New Teacher Toolkit: This toolkit helps school systems provide new teachers the support they need—and information on how to reorganize the resources to do it.
• Finding Time for Collaborative Planning: This brief provides context on how American teachers currently spend their time and offers practical strategies for how principals can create more collaborative planning time.

Step 3: Design a Strategic Schedule 

Once school teams reflect on their priorities and explore options for how to design their school schedule to accomplish those priorities, it’s time to start designing the schedule.

Click on the links below to access our staffing and scheduling tools and begin the schedule design process. Also see our elementary school schedule design tool that we use in consult with school and district teams. To learn more about the tool, or a potential partnership with ERS on designing a strategic school schedule, click the ‘Support’ tab.

Design (Elementary)  Design (Secondary)