ABSTRACT
In many elementary schools across the nation, the scheduling of art, music, physical education (PE), foreign language, computer, and other “encore” classes is less than ideal. All too often, elementary school encore teachers’ schedules are pieced around the assignment of part-time itinerant specialists (based on responses to the question, “When can I have your kids?” asked by encore teachers individually) and/or structured around a variety of individual teacher preferences unrelated to the mission of the school. This practice invariably yields a schedule characterized by haphazard and inefficient personnel assignments and fragmented core instructional time.
