How Scheduling Impacts Students

The Lunch Scheduling Challenge

Lunch at 9am? Lunch at 2pm?

Welcome to one of the most novel optimization problems Kristen and I have ever faced.

We’re working with a large private school whose scheduling team is exceptionally good. Like many top schools, their excellence created new challenges: students get every course they want at the cost of eating lunch at odd hours.

Some have lunch at 9am, others at 2pm. The school asked us: can ScheduleX bring some uniformity?

This has become a research project for us. As part of ScheduleX Research, we build custom solutions and algorithms for schools with complex needs.

What the Data Revealed

When we modeled the “lunch window” constraint, this is what happened:

• With no enforced lunch window, the schedule achieved 99.9% fulfillment and nearly every student got all their requests.
• When we enforced lunch between periods 3 and 6, fulfillment dropped to 99.6%.

Then we asked the school: “Do you want every student to have lunch between 11am and 1pm? That means 30 students don’t get a first preference course. What’s your policy on that?”

That’s when it hit me - this is not a scheduling question. This is a school policy question! For the first time, the school could see the cost of enforcing a “fair lunch policy” for all students through data. Whichever option they pick is a decision on policy.

Why These Trade-offs Matter

When I was in school, I would skip breakfast for early morning sports. Waiting for meals until 1pm would make me nauseous. I would personally opt into predictable lunches if given a choice, although my friends would prioritize the extra course load.

Which leads to another question - should the lunch policy be school wide? Or a student by student choice (opt in vs opt out)?

I never thought about scheduling this way before. There are so many small decisions and trade-offs every school makes. Choices that critically impact the student and teacher experience. Micro-decisions that weren’t obvious before.

That’s the real win here - surfacing these trade-offs and giving schools the ability to choose. Schools can now evaluate their own priorities with a clear and data backed view of the costs.