RHS continues to use an AI-powered platform called Timely to create students’ schedules after it was first introduced by the district last year. However, this year, there has been some student complaints over their schedules.

Timely is synced with Focus and uses students’ course requests and class sections created by assistant principals Alison Reams and Bill Parker to generate potential schedules.

Reams said they run several optimizations through Timely to look at how classes are working together, what’s not working and which schedule helps which group of students. She, alongside Parker, make edits to those optimizations to create a master schedule.

“There is unfortunately no perfect schedule for anybody,” Reams said. “So we are looking through the optimizations to see which schedule helps the most number of students.”

Despite almost 97% of students fully scheduled this year compared to around 42% in previous years, there’s still student complaints over not getting the classes they wanted, being put into the wrong class and waiting to get their schedule fixed.

Senior Tracey Rasugu said despite communicating to her counselor what courses she wanted and what her alternatives are, her schedule at the beginning of the school year wasn’t what she asked for.

She asked to switch her Counseling and Mental Health class if she got into Legacy but was still in that class after she got in. She also requested for two periods of early release but only had one for the fall semester, and for the second semester, she was placed in office aid which she never asked for.

“I communicated everything but then whenever the school year came around, everything is just all messed up,” Rasugu said.

She said it took a week of communicating back and forth with her counselor to fix her schedule.

Rasuga said she’s heard from many students across grade levels complain about their schedules and the AI system that created them.

“Everybody was talking about how their schedules are messed up,” Rasuga said. “Even to this day, on the second week of school, people are still talking about how their schedules are messed up.”

Senior Cindy Lieu said she requested to have PIP for the fall semester to her counselor and despite getting in the program, she didn’t have the class on her schedule at the beginning of the year. Instead, she had office aid which she did not ask for.

She said she already communicated to her counselor, her teacher and her coach on how she wanted her schedule to look like so it didn’t conflict with her other classes. Everything was confirmed, however, Lieu ended up emailing her counselor to fix her schedule and got office aid switched with PIP.

“I think that it was just the AI that didn’t know exactly what I wanted, which is why my schedule got messed up,” Lieu said.

Senior Nishat Tanseem said she requested to be in Spanish 4 and Senior Officer class yet it wasn’t on her schedule at the beginning of the year despite having enough space.

She was also put into AP Environment Science which she never asked for. Tanseem had to wait a week for her counselor to respond to her email because she was so busy fixing other student’s schedules.

She said this was the only year her schedule has been “messed up”. For the past two years, her schedule has always been fine and she’s never heard any complaints from her friends until now.

Sophomore Alex Garcia said he was accepted into AVID over the summer but his schedule still doesn’t have the class despite asking his counselor last week. He said he’s getting impatient because it’s been almost two weeks since school has started and he’s worried of falling behind.

Reams said they’re resolving scheduling issues with students by having conversations with them and checking each student’s situation intentionally, because they know it’s important for students to have the classes that best suit their interests and needs.

Counselor Laurie Laman said scheduling issues sometimes happen where students can’t take a class because it’s in a different period, so the counselors have to try to find another place to put them. Therefore, the counselors heavily rely on students’ alternative classes.

“If they didn’t get their first choice, at least they got something else that they wanted,” Laman said.

Reams said while the counselors had students’ alternative class requests, they didn’t put them into Timely because it was a new process. They wanted to make sure they weren’t trying something that wasn’t going to work.

However, if they needed to use a student’s alternative class, the counselors were to follow up with students and try to help them make the best decision. Next year, she’s looking into putting alternative classes in Timely so it can make decisions on the front end rather than having to call students on the back end to clean up their schedule.

“There were some other high schools in the district that did try that out and we hope to learn from them,” Reams said.

Reams said oftentimes though students end up forgetting what classes they signed up for. Therefore, it’s really important that whenever they’re picking out their schedules, students double check what classes they’re asking for because that’s what they use to build their schedules.

Even after getting her schedule fixed, Tanseem said she believes it shouldn’t have been messed up in the first place.

“I get that [counselors are] busy and there’s a lot of students but they should be able to get through everyone instead of just leaving it up to AI when they tell us not to use AI at school,” Tanseem said.

Lieu said she believes a counselor or an actual person does a better job than AI in creating schedules because if she wants her classes a specific way, a human would understand better.

Reams said using AI to help make schedules is like using ChatGPT to write an email. It may help but you’re still going to make edits and clean things up before actually sending it.

“I want people to know that there are humans that are looking at it, like assistant principals at Richardson High School,” Reams said. “We care a lot about making this work for our kids. And so I just don’t want them to think that it’s only the computer doing this.”

Reams said because of Timely, their timeline of getting schedules out was much better this year. They were able to release schedules on freshman orientation and incoming freshman were able to locate their classes before school started.

“I feel like even though it’s not a perfect system, it’s helping us be more efficient and getting like schedules out to teachers and students so that they have that information and can feel welcome coming to us,” Reams said.

Laman said previously the counselors would come to school in July and wait for around two weeks for the master schedule. They would then work for days right before school starts to get everyone a schedule.

This year, when the counselors came back to school on July 21st, the master schedules were done and they were able to jump straight into looking at conflicts and seeing what needs to be solved.

“It’s been a smoother transition this year for us than in years past,” Laman said.

Reams said for next year, she wants to continue looking at each student group individually, especially seniors who want late arrival or early release, to make sure they can accommodate that without putting stress on the middle of the day classes.

“I still have learned a lot,” Reams said. “And there are things that I know now to look for next year, but I think overall it’s been a good change.”