K-12 Timetable Software That Stops Eating Your Summer

aSc and Lantiv are dedicated desktop timetabling tools — strong solvers, weak everything else. OpenEduCat's constraint engine handles the same auto-generation problem but lives inside the same system as your gradebook, attendance, parent portal, and student records. You build the schedule once and it propagates everywhere; there is no nightly export-import dance to keep your SIS in sync. If you already own aSc and only need a timetable, keep using it. If you are buying a school management system anyway, the integrated timetable saves an interface.

Yes. Each school in a multi-campus deployment can run its own schedule template — elementary on a six-period day, middle school on a rotating Day 1-6 cycle, high school on a 4x4 block — all in the same instance. The student record and parent portal adapt to whichever school each student is enrolled in. International schools running IB on 70-minute blocks alongside a national-curriculum primary section is a common setup.

Teacher emails or texts the absence at 6am. Office staff marks them absent in the system. The substitute pool — filtered by certification, availability flag, and proximity — is surfaced ranked. Office assigns coverage; the substitute gets a push notification with classroom, roster, today's lesson plan, and any notes from the absent teacher. If no internal substitute is available, the system can post to an external pool (Frontline, Aesop) via API. Parents and students are not notified of substitutes by default — that is a per-school setting.

Yes. IB DP requires students to schedule six subject groups at HL/SL across two years, with TOK and CAS overlaid. The system models each subject group as a constraint, each HL/SL section as a separate teaching block, and validates that every student's choices map to a feasible timetable before the year starts. The Aug catch — when one HL Bio student creates a clash for the whole HL Bio cohort — is exactly what the solver is for.

Yes. Constraints are defined per cohort, per subject, per teacher, or globally. Common examples: PE cannot follow lunch, no two consecutive science periods for Grade 4, Ms. Chen needs Wednesday afternoons off for graduate study, the gym is unavailable Friday after 2pm for assembly setup. Each constraint is tagged hard or soft; the solver explains in plain text which soft constraints it relaxed and why.

Period attendance pulls directly from the published schedule — when third period starts, the attendance roster for that section appears in the teacher's app. The gradebook inherits class assignments from the timetable, so the moment you publish, every teacher sees their classes and rosters. If you move a student from one section to another mid-term, attendance and grade records follow the change automatically. No CSV re-imports.