I'm almost ready to begin generating schedules for students, but since this is not only my first time using Blackbaud but also my first time doing scheduling, I'm wondering if any of you have any recommendations regarding whether to schedule students by class, e.g., Freshmen, Sophomores, etc., or by entire student body? Appreciate your feedback. Thanks.

hi Bernie, I am in the same boat and it has NOT been easy! Soorry to say so! We ran all our kids at one time. I think next year we will do it by grade level. Also, we had the benfit of a consultant on campus who helped us to create some of the master schedule manually first so we could select the courses that HAD to be in certain places at certain times. I would be interested in connecting with you via email outside of this forum if you are interested as well. Best of luck, Jan

I have been using Blackbaud for scheduling for the past 5 years now and it has been a struggle every year. The last 2 years we've found that manually scheduling freshman classes first and then doing the other grade levels by priority has worked fairly well. There is still lots of manual moving and fixing to make it work. Every year we try something a little different hoping a better process! Good Luck!! Jennifer Frim

Scheduling is always an issue but remember it is a process. I didn't hear anyone say they used a scheduling team to perform the manual scheduling. I work as a Registrar/DB Admin and we first put together a scheduling team comprised mainly of teachers trained in scheduling theory. I met with the team to develop a plan for creating the schedule manually as a process model. The team created a matrix to be used for data entry of courses, classes, meeting times and teachers. Lastly, students were entered to finalize the enrollment process. We approached the scheduling grade by grade beginning with Middle School on to Upper School. We also re-coded all of the courses so that they would be easy to read and minimize the possibility of duplication. This worked well! I guess you could approach it from the standpoint that scheduling is never error-free especially when you do not create it within the system. Hope this helps!

Hi Jan, We have had BB for several years and just upgraded to Version 7. 2007-2008 will be our first attempt at using the system to create a master schedule and schedule students. After reading these posts I am reluctant. We are a small school of approximately 260 students, grades 9-12. Unfortuantely our students do not fit into any Core Curriculums. I'm afraid that with our many exceptions that it might be a waste of time and effort to use BB to create our schedules. What do yo think? Thanks for your input, Jean Phillips

HI Jean, We, too are are relatively small high school. (535) grades 9 - 12. We scheduled semesters 1 and 2 as we always do but our problem was that we did not have a good MASTER schedule going in so our kids schedules were not so good! We are planning to redo the semester 2 Master schedule and I think we are doing it manually by placing our classes where we weant them and then lettign the system palce the kids. I hope that works better. This is all new to us and I understand there is a big learning curve. We are now going to be taking a "team approach" to scheduling so that the repsonsiblity and frustrations do not fall on one persona s it has in our past. If you would like to connect out of this loop please email or call!

Yes I would like to. What is your email address? Mine is [Email Removed]. We are in Daytona Beach, FL.

We are a small school as well 600+. However, we have three divisions (L,M,U) in which we do scheduling in Ver. 7. It is easy to use the system to enroll in the core and elective curriculums for the L and M divisions which are fairly fixed. I personally find it easier to do it by grade level. For upper school, after the students schedules have been done for the most part manually, we (2/3 of us) then enter course requests and then I create classes and it sections and then go in an enroll the students. There is really no way around the level of work involved, but after while it's pretty routine. Our BB consultant on site after we migrated last year agreed that it would be difficult for us to use the master schedule to generate our schedules. Although, I wouldn't be discouraged as each school is different in their school setup and course structure.

We have been using BB version 6 and 7 for at least the past 7 years. During that time we have created a few manually scheduled classes that were driven by teacher and room availability, but otherwise we have used Generate Master Schedule with a high degree of success. We found that the key to any successful schedule is the preliminary work which is not as fun as solving the puzzels. The hard work is defining the timetables, patterns, courses, resources (teacher and room), target and maximum class sizes, number of courses allowed, etc.... Once all that is done and course requests have been entered we create classes automatically and carefully check our results. We then automatically schedule the science courses with labs and the other "non-normal" classes. Then we begin the process of layering in single section courses, double section courses, triple section courses, and then all other courses. Now it's time for students and we do that by grade levels starting with the seniors. This is only a brief summary of the process and I'm sure that I forgot numerous steps but I hope it helps. If anyone would like to contact me my email address is [Email Removed] and I work at Landon School in Bethesda, Maryland. Good luck!

Well said Mr. Fullerton. This is the first year I successfully created a BB master schedule using the BB scheduler [version 7]. It took quite a while to plan and then update all the preliminary information in timetables, patterns, etc. including all the work in courses but it was WELL worth the time spent. The scheduler worked well to place our many singletons and we were able to finalize our schedule with comparatively few changes [the comparison is to previous horrific years of trying to manually build the schedule!]. Last year [summer] I attended the Blackbaud University - but the class was too late to impact our already quite far along schedule. This year I followed my class syllabus from the BB University word for word - and it truly worked. Yippee.

I am curious to know how you have built your course requests as it is a key input for the Scheduler in order to schedule singletons, doubletons and minimize conflicts. In the past we have used a "transition matrix" in order to assist in knowing what courses students should transition in to for the next year. An example would be English 9 Honors students would mostl likely go in to English 10 Honors or AP English Language and Theater I students will go to Theater II. There does not seem to be any way to load this transition matrix or 'course progression data' in to Blackbaud. With our school typically generating 80% of a students schedule, building these course requests has become a daunting task. We have gone so far as to purchase NetClassroom however there does not appear to be a way to restrict what choices a student sees.

We work with advisors, department chairs, and parents to have the students fill out a form with their requests for the upcoming year. the department chairs send out a list of all available options for each of the studeents and it is the job of the advisor to ensure that a studenets only signs up for approved classes. Once the advisor and the student finish filling out the form it is sent home for a parent.guardian signature. We then enter the completed forms by hand into the system to determine how many sections of each course we have to teach.

So another big problem for us last year was scheduling accross multiple schools - we have a Middle School and an Upper School. Students sometimes take MS classes while in the US and vice versa. Blackbaud was not able to mitigate conflicts between courses offered in different schools on the student's schedule. I received this peice of follow-up information from a scheduling expert at Blackbaud regarding this known issue: "The heart of the problem revolves around the difference in how terms are defined for upper school vs. middle school. One uses semesters, and the other uses trimesters. Based on how the two sets of terms happen to overlay each other, situations exist where for some classes cycle days conflicts do not exist, but in other cycle days it does. In other words, a conflict may not exist on Monday or Tuesday, but may exist for Wednesday. Currently I believe the program is only looking at the first cycle day of the class to determine whether a conflict exists. So if a particular class is not in conflict the first day of the cycle, it is scheduled, even if other days in the cycles do have conflicts. This is not an easy problem to fix, and a fix that has to be implemented carefully, so as not to cause problems elsewhere." They do not beleive they can fix this problem before schools will have to schedule for next academic school year. Not sure if this effects anyone else as much as it effects us but I would love to hear your feedback if it does! Thanks, TK