Policy Analytics in Public School Operations

Abstract

Optimizing School Operations, Holistically School districts in the United States face a variety of operational problems, often treated in isolation due to their inherent complexity: for instance, school assignment and school transportation are rarely considered jointly. We develop an optimization-based approach to three key problems in school operations: school assignment, school bus routing, and school start time selection. Our methodology improves upon the state of the art in two ways: by leveraging a simplifying assumption of fixed route arrival times to tractably optimize school bus schedules and school start times simultaneously, and by proposing a postimprovement heuristic to jointly optimize assignment, bus routing, and scheduling. We evaluate our approach on a practical case study.