Overview

Designing quality, dedicated, and individualized support for special education and emergent bilingual students (or multilingual learners) presents significant challenges for school districts, made even more complicated by budget pressure. One of the most critical components of special education planning is the development of the master schedule based on specific student needs and the availability of learning specialists while integrating with general education classes. What’s more, federal data shows that 21% of public schools were not fully staffed in special education at the start of the 2023-2024 school year—higher levels of reported shortages than any other teaching specialty.

Two Texas districts — Richardson Independent School District and Mesquite Independent School District — partnered with Timely and leveraged strategic scheduling to tackle these and other unique challenges for their special populations.

Key Findings

Through their partnership with Timely, these two districts achieved goals they previously weren’t able to accomplish:

• Staffing Efficiencies:

  • Both Richardson ISD and Mesquite ISD increased staffing efficiencies for their special education teachers, significantly reducing the risk of inevitable hiring needs driven by attrition or an influx of new students.

  • Mesquite ISD, which implemented a pilot with Timely across two middle schools in 2023-24, identified, on average, an excess of 2.0 FTEs of special education teachers at each campus. This means if more students with IEPs enroll during the school year, they could serve those students with existing staff. Or, if there were a staff separation (e.g., retirement, resignation), they could continue meeting student needs with the remaining teachers.

• Better delivery of services:

  • Learning specialists are less likely to be stretched across content areas. Instead, there is a greater dedication of learning specialists within their content expertise, allowing teachers to become more familiar with student learning needs while providing support as indicated by the IEP.

• Significant time savings and process improvements:

  • Richardson and Mesquite were able to finalize their schedules in a fraction of the time – on average, both districts saved 50-100 hours per campus compared to prior years. For many administrators and counselors, this is the equivalent of getting their summer back!