How switching works
What the move actually takes.
No discovery phase, no implementation partner, no six-week onboarding. Here is the real sequence, the honest timing, and what to do about the year already underway.
When in the year to start
The master schedule calendar is long and unforgiving, so timing matters more than almost anything else about the switch.
The Association of California School Administrators lays out a realistic timeline: planning from August to December, course selection January to March, building April to May, and fine-tuning June through October. A deputy superintendent quoted in that piece notes the obvious complication — "so much changes over the summer… you can't finalize it until just before school begins."
| If you start… | What's realistic | Our honest advice |
|---|---|---|
| Aug–Nov | Best case. You are in planning; nothing is committed yet. | Ideal. Set up, import last year's data, and practise on it with no stakes. |
| Dec–Feb | Course selection is running or about to. Requests are arriving. | Very workable. Import requests as they land and clean the data early. |
| Mar–Apr | Build season. Tight, but this is when the pain is loudest. | Run in parallel with your current method. Do not cut over blind. |
| May–Jun | You are fine-tuning a schedule that mostly exists. | Import what you built and use nOS to find what is still broken. |
| Jul–Aug | Firefighting. Late adds, staffing changes, students who moved. | Do not attempt a first-time cutover now. Start for next year in the fall. |
The sequence
Five steps. For a school whose data is already in an SIS or a spreadsheet, the first four are typically an afternoon rather than a project.
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We set up your school
We create your school's account and send an invite link. You click it and set your own password. There is nothing to install and no server to provision — nOS runs in a browser.
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Bring in your data
Connect your student information system in one step, or upload a spreadsheet workbook. Either way nOS pulls courses, sections, teachers, rooms, students and course requests, and gives you a report of exactly what came across and what it could not read.
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Clean it
The Data Cleaner surfaces the problems every real dataset has — duplicate course codes, requests pointing at courses that no longer run, teachers loaded past the number of periods in a day, required fields left blank. You fix them in place, with undo, before anything is built.
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Build
Generate a full master schedule. Try it against a different optimization goal and compare the two side by side. Type your school's rules in plain English — "keep AP Bio in period 3" — and rebuild.
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Refine and publish
Work the remaining gaps on the Board or with nOS AI, each change staged and previewed with its effect on fulfillment. When you are satisfied, export it, or preview and push it back to your SIS.
Run it in parallel first
Why we suggest this instead of a trial
Scheduling software is impossible to evaluate on sample data, because the entire question is whether it handles your singletons, your teacher constraints, and your rooms. A generic trial tells you about the interface. A parallel build tells you whether it works.
What we need from you
Courses and sections, course requests, teachers, rooms, your period structure, and student enrolment. Nothing needs reshaping into a template first — nOS reads workbooks as they are, pulls SIS data through the connector, and the Data Cleaner reconciles the rest.
It is US-hosted and encrypted in transit and at rest; nOS operates as a school official under FERPA. The security page has the specifics.
The year already in progress
Schools rarely get to switch at a convenient moment, so this comes up constantly.
Import the schedule you already run. Use it to find what is broken — students missing a requirement, unbalanced sections, over-loaded teachers. Useful in October, and it commits you to nothing.
The best first year is a practice year. Set up in the fall, import last year's finished data, and build against it. You will know within an afternoon whether nOS produces a better schedule than your current process did — with zero risk, because the year it applies to is already over.
Your data stays yours
Nothing about nOS is designed to trap you, and that is worth knowing before you start rather than after.
- Everything exports. Student schedules, section summaries, class rosters, teacher schedules, room schedules, unfulfilled requests and unfulfilled-by-cause — each as CSV, Excel or print-ready PDF, with control over the columns.
- Individual schedules export as calendar files. A student's or teacher's schedule downloads as an .ics, or copies as plain text to paste into an email.
- Your SIS stays the system of record. If you connected one, it is authoritative the whole time — nOS adds to it and never takes it over.
- Exports work on the demo too. You can see exactly what comes out before you ever put a real student in.