Master scheduling

Tammy Jenkins

Our school has recently signed on to Blackbaud. One key feature that sold us on the product was the ability to create a master schedule with ease. However, we have run many different schedules through the master scheduling and have not be able to come up with a schedule that works for our school/ students. We have even had to work with a private consultant who is basically making progress by doing the master scheduling manually. Has anyone else experienced these issues when creating a master schedule in Blackbaud? We were told that we simply needed to hit a button and the work would be done for us. That is not the case at all!

JoAnn Strommen

@Crystal Bruce @Tammy Jenkins

Is there a better forum to post this? Doesn't seem to be RE related.

Crystal Bruce

Discussion moved to Blackbaud K-12 Solutions community.

Crystal Bruce

@Tammy Jenkins Hi Tammy, we appreciate this feedback and your satisfaction is our utmost priority. I have reached out to your Customer Support Manager and he will be in contact with you!

Candace Chesler

@Tammy Jenkins - the Master Scheduler tool works beautifully when you have your courses completely set up on the Schedule and Scheduling Rules tabs of the Course (identifying who can teach the course, maximum sections, target enrollments, etc.) AND you have a block schedule - or at a minimum, consistent meeting times for courses. If you can set all those rules and parameters - you should be able to get the tool to work.

As an elementary/middle school - we don't give our students any choice on their courses. We also have varying class times in our Lower School - ranging from 30 minute to 75 minute courses - with lots of permutations in between. Due to our own inability to be consistent and to set rules - we continue to build our schedules using an Excel document - and then I “translate” those into what fits with the K-12 software.

Tammy Jenkins

@Candace Chesler We did all of those things. Setting rules, setting up the course parameters, block scheduling, etc. We even worked with a private consultant who is a former employee of Blackbaud. She didn't even understand why a workable schedule could not be made by the system. She ended up doing it manually for us. We are hoping to get clarity for next year because the process this year was painful and certainly not user friendly!

Morgan Kunze

@Tammy Jenkins I'd love to learn more about what the failures looked like when running the master schedule. I'm in the process of doing all the scaffolding work with course/schedule rules. It's a lot! Learning from your experience might save me some time grinding on this project. Anything you can share would be helpful! I'm sure others would want to know as well, but if you don't want to rant here, feel free to reply off thread.