DMSchedule’s powerful software allows you to quickly and easily create schedules for hybrid, remote, and in-person learning so you can be prepared for whatever lies ahead.
COVID-19: Create schedules for in-person, hybrid and remote learning
Our Perspective
School schedules are a powerful lever for raising achievement
Time is a valuable and scarce resource for schools. While school schedules are created with the best intentions, the enormous complexity of scheduling often results in schedules filed with uncomfortable compromises. Too often, administrators, teachers, and staff lament that instructional best practices cannot be implemented because the schedule simply stands in the way.
With a strategic approach and DMGroup’s powerful software DMSchedules, you can create schedules that allow you to implement instructional best practices for students in general education as well as special education. DMSchedules allows you to make the most of every minute of every school day.
Dr. Tanzy Kilcrease"Our district now has consistent scheduling guidelines aligned to best practices across all elementary schools, allowing us to increase equity. We’re also now providing 45-minutes of daily intervention, creating opportunity to drive improvements in achievement levels."
Our Approach
While technology has transformed so many aspects of our lives, school scheduling continues largely to be done by hand or at best with a spreadsheet. DMGroup knew there had to be a better way, so we developed powerful scheduling software DMSchedules.
DMSchedules allows you to quickly and easily build elementary schedules for general education and special education. Set and embed instructional guidelines, and then easily explore multiple scenarios with a drag-and-drop feature. When you have chosen the best schedule for your school’s needs, DMSchedules allows for easy sharing of schedules among teachers, staff, and administrators.
What used to take days can now be done in hours. And the schedules you create with DMSchedules ensure your instructional guidelines are being met. The result is better schedules for your students and your teachers.
Finding time in the school day for your priorities is possible with DMGroup's scheduling software.
Elementary Scheduling Best Practices:
- Ensure 90 minutes of uninterrupted time for Reading and 60 minutes of Math instruction daily
- Implement a daily intervention and enrichment period to support all students
- Deliver specials cost-effectively and equitably across schools and grades
- Create opportunities for common planning time for grade-level teachers every day
Special Education Best Practices:
- Preserve access to core instruction/Do not allow students to be pulled out of core instruction
- Extra instructional time must truly be extra instructional time. This is not to be confused with “extra help” time or extra time with adults.
- Ensure content-strong staff provide interventions and supports.
- Elementary students who are having difficulty with reading should receive at least 30 minutes of additional reading instruction
With DMSchedules for Elementary Schools, you can quickly and easily create strategic master schedules, and student and staff schedules. With DMSchedules for Special Education, you can schedule student services with ease and ensure that IEPs are being successfully met.
Key Benefits
Create best practice schedules to support your instructional priorities
- Unlock opportunities to raise achievement and improve equity
- Respond effectively to fluctuations in enrollment
- Achieve instructional best practices and implement district-wide instructional guidelines with fidelity
- Model different scenarios in a fraction of the time and optimize your schedule
- Increase collaboration in the scheduling-building process, resulting in more support and buy-in for the resulting schedules
Consulting Services
Make the most of every minute of the school day
DMGroup’s Elementary Schedule Audit analyzes your current schedules and scheduling practices and compares them to best practices so you can discover how to make the most of every school day. After as little as 3-4 weeks, and with minimal time and effort required from your staff, a member of our team of experts will present the audit findings, clarify best practices, and lead a discussion to help you prioritize the most valuable opportunities for improvement.
DMSchedules for Elementary Schools Solutions combine our powerful, proprietary scheduling software, field-proven best practices, and team of scheduling experts to help you define instructional priorities and develop powerful, student-centered master building schedules and individual staff schedules tailored to your specific needs so that you can make the most of every minute of every school day.
Define Priorities
Our approach begins with a needs assessment in which we conduct an analysis of your schedules to identify strengths and areas for improvement. After presenting scheduling and instructional best practices, DMGroup works with your leadership team to establish the goals and priorities to be achieved.
Master and Staff Schedules
In partnership with you, we create a master school schedule tailored to your needs from which homeroom teacher schedules, specials rotations, and teacher and staff schedules are then automatically generated. Our software makes it easy to view and share schedules with others, such as principals or central office leaders.
Experiment with Scenarios
Our DMSchedules scheduling software allows central office, schools, and staff to quickly and easily experiment with different scenarios within desired constraints and to make final modifications. And, all this scheduling can be done in up to 80% less time than traditional methods.
Empower your Team
DMGroup provides training for district and building leadership teams regarding best practice schedules and instructional best practice. We also provide ample software training to ensure that staff can work independently to create new schedules, experiment, and respond to changes.
Build Support for Change
Our facilitation and change management process will help you increase collaboration, thereby building buy-in for a new approach that supports your school and district priorities.
DMSchedules for Special Education enables your special educators, interventionists, related service providers, and support staff to coordinate the scheduling of student services so that nothing falls through the cracks. With this powerful software, you can ensure that IEPs are met and that best practices are implemented. Scheduling sharing allows for strong coordination and improved services for students.
Looking for Professional Development?
DMGroup offers professional development for your team on best practice approaches to building schedules that unlock opportunities to raise achievement and improve equity. We can provide this training tailored to focus on the highest leverage best practices at the elementary level or at the secondary level.
Client Result
Bibb County School District (GA) established district-wide instructional guidelines and overhauled master schedules across all 22 elementary schools.
Read the Success StoryDr. Curtis Jones, Jr., Superintendent Bibb County School District (GA)I’m excited to see the progress taking shape. Moving forward this year, I expect our focus on scheduling at the elementary level, as well as our continued focus on reading support programs and professional learning for teachers, to impact our students in a positive way.
Dr. Abelardo Saavedra, Former Superintendent South San Antonio ISD (TX)DMGroup's in-depth analysis helped our district glean critical data-driven insights about our staffing and equipped us to make meaningful changes in the ways we allocate resources. Ultimately, this work positioned us to positively impact students and raise performance in our district.
Featured Resource
Making School Scheduling More Strategic
In this article originally published in the May 2018 edition of School Administrator magazine, DMGroup Managing Director Nathan Levenson argues the task of school scheduling, while often left to an assistant principal, would benefit from collective attention and expertise. He shares what it means to approach scheduling strategically and identifies practices of schools and districts that are creating better, more student-centered schedules.
Interested in something more specifically tailored to meet your needs?
DMGroup can provide custom-tailored support to help your school district in the area of developing powerful school and staff schedules that support your priorities. If you have a unique need, reach out to let us know how we can help you.