Strategic Scheduling with Timely: A Key to Managing Educational Fiscal Challenges

Many schools struggle to create their master schedule each year. With dropping enrollments and a looming fiscal cliff, how schools use their teachers and classrooms will be even harder. I sat down with Paymon Rouhaniford, CEO of the startup Timely, to discuss how their tool can help schools schedule smarter and allow schools to focus on their highest priorities. As always, subscribers can listen, watch below, or read the transcript.

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Time Topic

4:44 Timely’s origins

6:53 Elevating priorities with Timely

8:08 Camden as a case study 

15:50 Unlocking possibilities with zero-based budgeting

18:11 The “how” of Timely

20:35 Adding complex criteria to the model

22:48 Budgeting post-ESSER

Michael Horn:

To help us think about some of the steps we can take to build a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose, particularly as districts are staring at a fiscal cliff right in the face right now, is Paymon Rouhanifard. Paymon, it's so good to see you because we've talked the last few times on the phone, but not actually on video, so it's good to see you. Thanks for joining us.

Paymon Rouhanifard:

Thanks for having me.

Michael Horn:

So before we get into the company you've started, Timely, and some of the early successes that you've had and help our audience understand the problem. I’d just love you to talk about your own journey of educational entrepreneurship, and the work you've done in education and how you come to this current challenge and opportunity that you're seeking to help educators with.

Paymon Rouhanifard:

Yeah, it all really starts from lived experience. And so, I started my career as a 6th-grade teacher in New York City, drew some connections between what was happening inside of my school in West Harlem and the decisions the central office was making and wanted to be a part of those more systems-level solutions. And that led to a career working inside of districts. And so, I was in the Bloomberg administration working for Chancellor Joel Klein. We got termed out. I crossed the river into New Jersey, where I worked in Newark public schools, and ultimately became the superintendent of Camden, New Jersey. And Camden was a really formative experience. It was a school district that was put under state control right at the time I got appointed. I was the first superintendent appointed subsequent to that very fateful decision, and I was the 13th superintendent in the prior 20 years. So, there's just a lot of turmoil, a lot of turnover and confusion. And that experience, and I describe it as the best job I've ever had that I never want to have again, deeply shaped the work I'm doing today. And so immediately after I did that for five years, immediately after that experience, I started a nonprofit called Propel America, which is in a different space, but it speaks to a major pain point we felt in Camden, which is we increased the college matriculation rate, we changed the college going culture in Camden. There's a four year college pennant hanging in every classroom and hallway. I’m deeply proud of that fact, and at the same time, I saw a massive uptick in stopouts—students leaving traditional higher ed and entering the labor market with debt and little additional earning ability. And so,  Propel America kind of drives a solution in that chasm of a challenge. And this is one I know you know quite well, kind of various hats you wear, Michael. We created a model called “jobs-first higher education,” which was intended to basically get young people into a living-wage job, but also the ability to get college credit so they could stack into a higher degree. So I did that for a few years, and then Timely. In Timely, the road goes back again to Camden. It was actually a board meeting I went to at the start of our first or second school year, and there were a lot of angry teachers in the room and some students and some parents. And I learned that we didn't stick the landing for scheduling. We didn't get scheduling right for one of our high schools, and students were in the cafeteria. There was a lot of confusion at the school, and I got under the hood of scheduling. First time, I was truly accountable for scheduling. And what I learned then was…I had sort of three aha moments. This obviously connects to Timely. The first was I couldn't believe how freaking hard scheduling was and just how complicated of a problem it is to solve. The second was I couldn't believe how few tools and solutions there were. So, there was really no sophisticated answer to the challenges that we were confronting. And so we were using Google Sheets and whiteboards and bulletin paper. And then third, just what a missed opportunity it was. Scheduling sits at this incredible intersection of the student and teacher experience, innovative staffing and budget solutions, and yet here we are, just, like, mousing around Google Sheets and whiteboarding our way to a schedule. And so that led me to this realization over time after I had left the Superintendency, that scheduling shouldn't have to be this process you suffer through and endure, but it should actually enable your core priorities.

Michael Horn:

Sorry, I'm just like still, there's so many places we could go in this conversation, because Propel America and the solution you built there, I think, was really ahead of its time in many ways. I'm just thinking also of all of the school districts now coming to this realization of, frankly, the lackluster results that so many colleges are getting for their students right. Even when they get them to college, as you started to do in Camden, and sort of what a visionary company that was. And it strikes me the Timely is much the same as you say it right. Like, the biggest use or sort of how we can impact the lives of students is through the use of time and people in ways that better get know the progress that they need to get done. So, let's dig deeper on what Timely is, then, against that problem that you observed in Camden when you were superintendent.

Paymon Rouhanifard:

Yeah. Our belief is that the master schedule should be the beating heart of a school. The way you use time and resources is as paramount of a decision as one can make as a systems leader, as a school-based leader. And instead, right now, the reality for most school leaders and for district administrators is you're just suffering through this process. You're just trying to get to the finish line. And generally, the starting point for most folks who are responsible for scheduling, they just roll over last year's schedule, which is understandable because there's a huge disincentive to recreate your schedule again because of how complicated it is. And when you're rolling over the schedule, that's how you can inadvertently calcify both inefficiencies and inequities. And so, the idea behind Timely is you should create a schedule that's aligned to your priorities, that enable your priorities, be they academic, budget and staffing. And to do that, you need a really sophisticated tool, a sophisticated set of supports, and there just really aren't many out there.

Michael Horn:

So how do you start with those? Because the big question there, right, is priorities and a school being clear about what those are. I can't tell you the number of district superintendents I meet with, and they're like, “These are our 20 priorities”. And I'm like, “If you have 20 priorities, you have none.” So how do you really help a district and their leadership team first figure out what is the core thing that we need to focus on?

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Paymon Rouhanifard:

It varies completely district to district, CMO to CMO. One of our beliefs at Timely is that we should be there to operationalize one's hopes and dreams. So, it's just worth stating outright. We are an implementation tool. We're not a strategy consulting shop to help them define those priorities. We'll give input and we'll tell them, “Hey, look, I'm seeing 25 different priorities and you may want to cull it.” And so, there is that sort of sounding board in problem solving, but ultimately we're there to operationalize hopes and dreams and happy to make that more concrete, whether it's the case study we just put out or another example. But you're exactly right that this is sort of inherent to the challenge, that sometimes there are more problems being called out that they're trying to solve than they can actually solve.

Michael Horn:

Well, let's go just where you suggested then. Let's take a case study where a district you've worked in and I'll let you choose the one and just sort of talk to us through how you helped align the use of time and resources with the priorities that they actually held.

Paymon Rouhanifard:

Yeah, so our largest pilot partner, so last year we wrapped up a pilot working with 17 schools spanning three districts across three states. The largest of those partners, Lubbock ISD in the panhandle of Texas represented 14 of those 17 schools, so they have nine middle schools and five high schools. And so, Lubbock came into scheduling with one overarching challenge, which is they had experienced and are still experiencing declining enrollment. And so, the budget pressures created by that and also the fact ESSER funds are expiring and you touched on the fiscal cliff at the top of this conversation that's exacerbating those budget pressures. And so, they wanted to begin the first year of a multi-year process to essentially confront that challenge and to use their words to right size the district. And at the same time, they had some core academic priorities. At the top of that list was middle school performance. And so, they had been really struggling, particularly in core subject areas with middle school performance. And then the second item, in terms of academic priorities, was to enable better supports to students with disabilities. Even as their overall enrollment had been declining roughly about 10% over the last five years, their students with disabilities, their special education populations were increasing during that time. And so, they wanted to figure out a way to dedicate greater resources and support to those special populations. So, enter Timely. And we did some light analysis, and they led a lot of this themselves, but ultimately the core exercise was how can we create a master schedule across those 14 schools that built a bottoms-up schedule that essentially helped enable those priorities. And I'll just tell you the headline and we can go from there. So, across those 14 schools, they identified 37 positions that they could eliminate through vacancies created by attrition. And so that is to say, no single teacher was laid off, there was no reduction in force, no one was let go. And those 37 positions, in terms of the savings that created $2.2 million to use their budget dollars, 37 positions. Where we live in Massachusetts, that would be close to $4 million, but in Lubbock, $2.2 million. And they could then take the $2.2 million and invest it toward those academic priorities. So, they created block schedules for their middle schools, which required hiring additional core subject area teachers. And then they hired approximately, I want to say, at least ten additional special population instructors, so teachers to serve students with disabilities in addition to additional professional learning opportunities for those staff members. And so, yeah, the headline was they unlocked these resources because of the inefficiencies that are embedded in scheduling to enable those core academic priorities.

Michael Horn:

So, let's go deeper on this then, because that's a big headline, and if I'm understanding you correctly so maybe I'll state it and then you correct it and unpack it further, it sounds like as opposed to just taking for granted maybe previously they had a seven-period or eight-period day or something like that in the middle school. With your tool, they're able to build from the bottom up what's the right allocation of time for students across different subject areas? Build a schedule starting from that, and then say, okay, actually, we have these open positions. We don't need to hire for those. And we're going to take that savings that we realize from not hiring those and instead hire teachers and the priorities that we actually have, which is around these core subjects in middle school. And so, we're going to essentially be able to reallocate dollars to the things that we really care about and really need to deliver on that we haven't been. How does that measure up and how does that look in the process that you guys have created in the product itself?

Paymon Rouhanifard:

You captured that really well. And so, in terms of how did that play out? Their target average class size stayed the same from last school year to what they were hoping to create this school year, which I think is really important and interesting to call out. And what they learned through scheduling with us. And part of what we're passionate about in terms of helping other decision makers at districts or charter management organizations realize, is by using the scheduling process, you can identify where you have a mismatch of resources, where you might have inconsistent teacher loads and class sizes across schools. Because again, that common practice is you're just rolling over your schedule, which teachers are returning, and you're sort of in cruise control, right. By building a bottoms-up schedule that's based on student course requests, what are students asking for? What do students need? You can actually ultimately not only deliver better outcomes for students by virtue of a higher percentage of students that get their course request fulfilled, you can not only save hundreds of hours of time through just an easier process, and using a tool and a team of educators to support you, but you can identify those inefficiencies by just creating more consistent allocation or some intentional approach to more equitably allocate resources to schools. But what we almost always see is there's just a lot of randomness in the way decisions are made to allocate resources. There's a lot of times and this is all well intentioned, right, a squeaky wheel. The school leader that's really good at advocating for resources at their school and has maybe a lot of political power, whatever the case might be, and you end up having these inconsistencies that can really create inefficiencies.

Michael Horn:

So, I remember the famous Marguerite Rosa, I can't remember the name of the book right now, but she has this book on school finance, right? And I remember one of the case studies being something like, you think your core priorities are, say math and reading, but in fact, when we look at your budget on a per pupil basis, and you realize that it's like seven students for the cheerleading teacher or something like that, that you're actually really allocating the most money to cheerleading and that actually maybe is a stronger statement of what your actual strategy is rather than what you profess to want to be focusing on. How much of that are you finding where people are like, whoa, you mean I'm doing that? I had no idea.

Paymon Rouhanifard:

Well, I do think the fiscal cliff and the realities for some districts - I don't want to say all of them are falling into this trap - but where they have used one-time money to plug recurring expenses, I do think they're now being confronted by these realities. They're looking at their athletics budgets and other budgets that speak to a different set of priorities than the ones they profess and the ones that are in their strategic plans that they're sharing out at their school board meetings.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, and often, right, strategy is what you actually do, not what you say. So, you're helping them reset that. And it feels like that grounds up process, again, if I'm understanding, is sort of like a zero-based budgeting approach as opposed to just what did we do last year? We're going to add 5% or subtract 5% or whatever it might be, adjust on the margins. You're really building up. If districts start to do this work with Timely, I'm just sort of curious how imaginative it could get. In the sense that I heard a friend, Alex Hernandez once say schools, I think, don't realize how much freedom they're giving up when they just start with that master schedule and assume that that's a given, that when you rethink that, you can really reimagine time and space in some dramatically different ways - and the use of staff. How creative do you think you might see districts start to get if they start to build from that bottoms up as your tool starts to take them through?

Paymon Rouhanifard:

Well, I think ultimately the possibilities with scheduling are endless. And by the way, I love Alex. I'm not surprised that he said that. And that's a lovely anecdote. To the extent a school or a district wants to see their middle and high schools go through some sort of redesign process, that in itself is such a daunting task to consider scheduling through Google Sheets and Whiteboards. And so, you could completely rethink not just your bell schedule, but just the way your school is designed and operates, and scheduling ultimately ends up being the key disincentive to go through a process like that, to kind of rethink your values or just kind of operationalize the values that were already there. And so, the possibilities are really endless. You can introduce dual enrollment. You can recreate the structures in place that have prohibited your students to be able to access higher level coursework or certain experiences outside of the school. So, again, our job at Timely is not to come in and tell them how to do that and what exactly those priorities should be, but to give them a tool that can allow them to explore all of those possibilities and to ultimately enable those possibilities.

Michael Horn:

Very cool. So, we've spent a bunch of time on the why. I'm going to come back to the why at the very end and sort of what you can imagine, but I want to spend a little bit of time on the how. Like, how does this tool really do something different from other tools out there on the market. I think a lot of people will say, yeah, I hear you on the Google spreadsheets, but I also have my master scheduling, whatever thing I've used for 20 years. How does the work…how do you ingest these priorities, look at what they're doing now, and build something different? How does the tool actually accomplish this?

Paymon Rouhanifard:

Yeah, the solution is two parts. Part one is a software application. And the important element of the software we've created is we're using optimization technology. And optimization technology, you see it in the healthcare system with hospitals and nursing schedules. You see it logistics, companies, transportation, etc. As tends to be true with education, we lag a little bit in adopting certain elements of technology. And so, the optimization technology helps put the puzzle together and take a lot of the guesswork out of the educator's hand. And so that's really important. But also, it's paired with critical support from a team of former educators, people who have built schedules before. So, I'm not the only person on the team that has worked inside of schools and districts. And we've got former directors of operations from charters who have built schedules, folks who have worked inside of district schools building schedules. And so, our ambition was not to create a piece of software and hand it over to schools and walk away. That's not the impact we're seeking to have in the world. We actually think it's really important to have that layer of support. And the reason for that is it's one thing to teach someone to use a piece of software to build a schedule, but it's another to support them, to build the best possible schedule that is aligned to their priorities, that enables their priorities. And so, there's a lot of troubleshooting and problem solving as you're pulling certain levers. What does that mean by way of outcomes? What are the sort of benefits and tradeoffs of various constraints you put in to get to a schedule that optimizes ultimately for the percentage of students who get a full schedule 

Michael Horn:

And when you're doing those constraints because obviously tradeoffs, I imagine, is the art of this. Not everyone gets the perfect thing, but I guess you're probably trying to make sure that they get an acceptable solution at minimum and then build the optimization from there. How does a district think about the tradeoffs that they're willing to make when something comes up and they say, gosh this or that? I do have to make a choice.

Paymon Rouhanifard:

Yeah, I'll give you a couple of examples to make that more concrete. So, one time we built a schedule with a school, and we saw that nearly 100% of the students got a full schedule, which is pretty unheard of. So, our target is 90% or higher. And when I was working in Camden Public Schools using hand tools, we would get about 65% to 75% of students fully scheduled and then you have to hand place the rest and it's a very time intensive process and we anecdotally 65% to 75% for your first run, fairly common. And so, with this school we hit well north of 90%, close to 100%. We looked at it a little further and we realized the teachers, on average, were switching classrooms twice a day and that was a lot to ask of the teachers. So, we introduced a new constraint that minimized the amount of classroom hopping for teachers, and that brought the percentage of students fully scheduled down modestly and that was the right tradeoff for that school to make. Another example would be we want to make sure every teacher has one prep, but we also want to ensure that there's a PLC on top of that, but can we actually pull that off? And this is like the status quo today where it's such a disincentive to create one schedule, yet alone two.So to slog your way to comparing two schedules is very challenging. But with us, you can run one scenario with the teacher prep requirement of one, and then the second one where you added a second teacher prep as a PLC as a common prep, and you can just compare and contrast what those outcomes look like. And so, each scenario is saved so that you can understand the benefits and tradeoffs.

Michael Horn:

Gotcha. Very cool. So last question for me, I guess, returning to the why piece of this, which we teased at the beginning, the fiscal cliff coming as ESSER funding runs out on districts, we'll see if there's some sort of extension, but presumably most of them are going to have fewer dollars than they've had in the next few school years. I'd love you to just sort of dimensionalize how the districts you're working with are thinking about that challenge because I imagine there's a lot of fear. Like all of a sudden, “Oh my gosh, who are we going to have to cut back?” And so how does a tool like yours come into that environment and say, we can help you manage that and you don't have to backtrack on your priorities, you can actually make progress. 

Paymon Rouhanifard:

Well, I think a lot of times the initial reaction is one of surprise, if not skepticism and then they spend a little bit more time understanding the solution and the challenges they're facing and seeing a sense of possibility. It's not often that you can present to someone the possibility of finding budget savings, but as a rising tide that lifts all boats, that doesn't necessarily come with hard tradeoffs. On the other side of that, I'll just also add it's also possible that some districts and some schools have fewer efficiencies, or inefficiencies I should say, that are identified. But generally speaking, across a larger number of schools, there are those pockets. And so, what that means is certain schools may end up actually adding staff, while other schools may end up sort of losing some of the resources that were previously allocated. And so that exercise is one that's iterative and it requires a lot of cross functional coordination within a school district. But I do just want to point out that it's not like across every school you find the same amount of inefficiencies. It's more just across the system, they can be discoverable.

Michael Horn:

Got you. That makes a lot of sense. So, as we wrap up here, how do folks find out more about Timely and is there anything else I should have asked that you want to jump in on and help people understand.

Paymon Rouhanifard:

They can learn more by going to timelyschools.com.ge  We would love more people to read the case study we just released about Lubbock ISD. We're going to be out there at various events talking about the Lubbock story, and I just so appreciate the time. I know we covered a lot.

Michael Horn:

Look, it's an incredibly important problem. It's an incredibly pressing time for districts to tackle it rather than just make the, “Oh, we have fewer dollars, we're just going to do the vertical chop down the line right.” To be thoughtful as they make those cuts so that students don't sacrifice. So, I'm glad you're doing the work you are, Paymon, and everyone can check out what you're doing at Timely, and just so appreciate you being here.

Paymon Rouhanifard:

Thanks again for having me.

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