Master Scheduling

Today and this past week has been extremely hectic. My new students received their schedules on Monday and on Tuesday I was notified that my schedule would be changing, which would influence the schedules of many of my students. This change took place on effective Wednesday. Also on Wednesday, the master scheduler informed another teacher on my team that their schedule would be changed as well and will take effect on Thursday. This also influenced the schedules of some of the same students. I must say that it's been extremely hectic for me and for all of my students to get adjusted two their new environment and the teachers to get adjusted to their new schedule. However no one seems to be really concerned. I guess my question is what role does school administration play or should play in the creation of a master schedule? I don't know much about a master schedule and how to create it or anything of that nature but I did have a conversation with the master scheduler who mentioned that they used the same one that they use last year however we have many more students this year than we did last year. Seeing as though administrators are responsible for the effective operations of the school, my question is should administrators be involved in the creation of master schedules or should they just leave it up to master scheduler, who can sometimes be the school counselors?

My mentor, who is also my assistant principal, involved me with the decision-making processes when it came down to adjusting the lunch schedules because of the lack of space in the cafeteria because we have so many more students this year. Today was really the first day that I saw the other side of administration in terms of how something as simple as scheduling can affect the operations of a school. Because we have so many more students this year than last year, it now affects the cafeteria staff and the amount of lunch periods. Well, cafeteria staff can only work a certain amount of hours so administrators have to think about how do we fit all of the lunch periods into a certain time frame. Again, it affects the scheduling. I learned through this situation today that school administrators have to have on several different hats throughout the school day because one decision that is made by one person in their office can affect the entire operation of the school.