Schools face a financial cliff. Last March the U. S. Department of Education cancelled all extensions of Elementary and Secondary Education Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds. The new policy requires states to reapply; in the meantime, they don’t receive the funds. “The clawback of previously approved funding extensions is resulting in students losing access to evidence-based programs that are addressing learning loss.” (www.afterschollalliance.org) These financial cuts hit especially hard given the increased special needs of students since the pandemic: mental health support, tutoring to catch up, addressing behavior and attendance issues, falling enrollment, etc.
The vast majority of school funding goes to salaries for personnel, on average 81%. (www.the74million.org) That reality has two significant consequences: funding cuts almost invariably require cuts in personnel, and any measures that maximize the use of personnel can help offset such cuts.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help “prioritize and enable broader academic, staffing, and budget goals. And most importantly, strategic scheduling can help ensure that all students get access to the courses they want and need to be on track to graduate, remain inspired to attend and excel in school, and be empowered to pursue a postsecondary pathway.” (www.the74million.org2) Misty Rieber, the chief academic officer of Lubbock Independent School District, which serves approximately 25,000 students in West Texas, says “there are few questions more paramount than how your staff and students spend their time every day, what positions you’ll hire for, how many teachers you will hire, and how students will be able to interact with them. Equitable resource allocation across schools, proper access to core courses and electives, and dedicated support to sub-groups begins with the development of a school schedule. And perhaps the most overlooked aspect of scheduling is the ability to develop innovative staffing and budgeting solutions.” (Ibid.)
Too often, schools “roll over” the previous year’s schedule even though it may no longer be appropriate for the upcoming year. Building a master schedule is an intensive, demanding, complex process. AI can transform this process. Lubbock, Texas, schools used AI to analyze thousands of possible scheduling scenarios, a task too broad for individuals, thereby allowing them to avoid defaulting to a prior schedule and instead to align the schedule with school and district priorities while meeting the student needs more efficiently. (www.the74million.org3)
After piloting using AI for master scheduling in select schools, Austin, Texas, now uses it for all 33 middle and high school master schedules. Trying to decide how to balance the needs of a student body that includes special education students, students on 504 plans, and emergent bilingual students added additional challenges that AI manages. (www.edweek.org)
AI can optimize resources and provide strategic alignment and adaptability to unexpected changes because it can process a level of complexity that considers countless variables: teacher preferences, student elective choices, room specifications, state rules, teacher certifications, class size issues, enrollment numbers both for specific classes and schoolwide, etc. A process like this is nearly impossible manually.
The Stanford Scale Initiative Accelerator for Learning published a 2025 research brief about this entitled The Key Resource of Time: Master Schedules and Effective Allocation of Students and Educators. They describe AI-driven scheduling tools as powerful solutions that “not only reduce the manual workload for administrators but also introduce a data-driven, strategic approach to scheduling, ensuring that student needs, teacher availability, and institutional priorities are balanced more effectively than ever before… By leveraging machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics, AI scheduling platforms can analyze historical enrollment patterns, optimize course placement, and anticipate scheduling conflicts before they arise.” The brief lists concrete benefits:
- Identifying staffing inefficiencies and potential budget savings.
- Creating better instructional delivery for special student populations, especially inclusion settings, to ensure that instructional specialists can focus on their content areas.
- Enabling academic interventions by grouping students and assigning them to targeted instructional supports such as MTSS [Multi-Tiered System of Supports, a proactive and preventative framework that integrates data and instruction to maximize student success from a strengths-based perspective] and learning acceleration strategies.
- Supporting strategic priorities by building in professional learning communities or common planning time (e.g. professional development blocks for first-year teachers and common planning periods with their mentor teachers).
It’s time for more districts to take advantage of the very positive outcomes that AI offers, at least in the area of building master schedules. Avoiding human error and dealing with layers of complexity that are challenging to solve manually should compel districts to invest in this process. Ultimately, they will save time and money, allowing them to avoid unnecessary cuts.