How Marlborough School Navigated a Scheduling Transition
Matt, a first-time scheduler, built a workable schedule in six weeks, the same time the previous scheduler had needed to build it by hand. With ScheduleX, he could test different versions of the schedule and add constraints and rules as he worked through it. Matt now estimates that an experienced registrar could do the same work in about a week. That time would let the school improve the parts of scheduling it had never been able to reach: how course requests are collected, how students' previous coursework is tracked, and how many sections each course needs.
In the first week of June, Marlborough School's longtime registrar left before the scheduling season began. She had built the schedule by hand for 16 years, and was the only person at the school that knew how to do it. When she left the school there was no documented process or playbook for others to follow to build the upcoming year’s schedule.
The responsibility fell on Matthew (Matt) Norko, Marlborough's Director of Technology. Matt had never built a school schedule before. While he was familiar with their SIS from a systems perspective, he had never worked with the parts of it needed for scheduling.
The ScheduleX Impact
ScheduleX gave Matt something the manual process could not: a practical way to iterate. Instead of rebuilding the schedule from scratch each time he uncovered a new “hidden” requirement, he could add a rule or constraint to the system, run the schedule again, and see how the change affected the outcome.That made it possible to work through the unknowns systematically. He ultimately explored ten different versions before arriving at a workable schedule. The rules, constraints, pairings, and balancing decisions he uncovered now live in ScheduleX, where the next scheduler can access them directly.
"You just look at the rules and you can figure out what our situation is like," he says. "It's documented there. You can see all the constraints that are in there, all the pairs, all the rules, all the balancing. And that's something that we just didn't have."
"Somebody can just log into the system and be like, oh, here it is. Here's all the stuff that we need to know." Marlborough's next registrar will not inherit what Matt inherited. She will have a documented starting point, rather than having to reconstruct years of scheduling knowledge on her own.
Throughout the process, he achieved fulfillment rates of 93-98%. While there is no benchmark to compare these numbers against, these are astonishingly high numbers that are hard to achieve manually. On efficiency, Matt estimated that an experienced registrar could build the schedule in about a week instead of six. "If you could give your registrar back five weeks, what would they be able to do instead?" he asks. For Marlborough, that time creates room to work on the parts of scheduling that the team previously didn't have time to improve.
Looking ahead
With the scheduling process now established in ScheduleX, the team can run it more efficiently and spend more time improving other parts of the process, including how course requests are collected, how students' previous coursework is tracked, and how the school determines the number of sections it needs.
The goal is no longer just to get the schedule built. It's to make the entire scheduling process work better year after year.
Matt’s advice to other schools
