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!