An Application of Operations Research to School Desegregation

This paper describes an operations research approach taken to implement a desegregation plan for the Oklahoma City Public Schools. While the main objective of the plan was desegregation, it also provides for an equal educational opportunity for all students and more efficient utilization of facilities. The essential element of the plan is that students attend their same home schools, but each school is responsible for a certain specialty area, such as science, mathematics, or foreign language. Students taking specialty courses travel to those schools. Thus, inherent in the plan is the technically complex problem of scheduling students among several schools in varying time patterns to minimize total weekly student travel time. A form of modular scheduling was developed which allowed different courses to be taught for different lengths of time. From an educational point of view, class times could be tailored to the needs of a particular course. Since students take courses in overlapping time blocks at more than one school, the problem of building the Master Schedule was quite complex. In general, a Master Schedule could result in a large number of student conflicts. A master scheduling program was, therefore, developed which (1) operates in a time-sharing mode so that it is interactive with the principal, (2) attempts to minimize student conflicts and (3) works for any time block configuration.