Overview

As Superintendent Kathy Rollo and the team at Lubbock Independent School District (LISD) prepared for the 2023-24 school year, they faced a host of complex challenges, shared by many districts around the country. The pandemic had taken its toll academically and emotionally, exacerbating achievement gaps. Enrollment has declined, falling approximately 9% in the last five years. And the financial pressure of that enrollment decline has been compounded by the ESSER fiscal cliff. The LISD team knew they needed to simultaneously 'right-size' the district while enabling investment in new programs to enhance academic outcomes and the student experience.

Key Findings

LISD took a unique approach to building these plans: they began working with Timely, a new scheduling organization, and utilized school scheduling as a vehicle to enable priorities for the 2023-24 school year. As a result, Lubbock was able to make significant progress towards its objectives:

• Address the need for improved middle school academic performance: the district invested in new double blocks of ELA and math which required hiring additional teachers.

• Increase capacity to better serve students with disabilities, a subgroup that has been steadily increasing even as overall enrollment has been decreasing: the district hired 18 more staff members across grades 6 to 12 and dedicated additional funding for professional development.

• Efficiently allocate resources across all schools to address budget pressures from declining enrollment: by scheduling more consistent class sizes and teacher loads, LISD reduced staffing by 37 positions across 9 middle schools and 5 high schools, representing ~$2.2 million of savings which were then reallocated to the above priorities. Critically, these savings were realized through attrition, and thus didn’t require layoffs or program cuts.

Impact

Altogether, scheduling uncovered misalignments and inefficiencies of over $2 million, which were then reallocated to critical new investments in middle school academics and supports for special populations to address the district’s evolving needs, centered on the urgency to enhance student learning. And the district took the first step of a multi-year plan to more efficiently allocate resources to schools given budget pressures while strengthening transparency and partnership between schools and the central office.