I’m curious if an additional constraint like “total (absolute) time shift from this year to next (over all families in the district) <= K” or “max shift in first bell over all schools in district <= MS” was considered, along with the acknowledgement that this is e.g. an N year process to get from the current schedule S_0 to the optimal schedule S^*.

In my mind, this alleviates a lot of the “would have to change jobs this year” concerns, because the people making changes would ALREADY be making bigger changes (starting to take their kids to school), and the most extreme schedule changes would be deferred until the children on the existing schedule had aged out of that grade’s current schedule.

(Done enough optimization modeling to know this isn’t an easy path... but seems like it has some potential.)

Similarly, (maybe this was just the article dumbing down reality a bit, but it sounded like the transit expenditure vs parent happiness units were somewhat fungible. Any possibility of offsetting a bit of upfront expenditure with future savings of the more efficient (say from year N/2 onward) future state?