Ezriel Schwartz · 40 schools · written 9 Nov 2026

What has to be built, step by step, and how hard each step is

Built from his original message and a line-by-line read of today's call, then checked against what already exists in the market.

The short answer

Yes, this can be built without Akiva, and built so it does not break. Nothing in it needs skills we lack. The scheduling brain runs on a free, proven solver from Google. Everything around it is ordinary business software, or something we buy.

Nobody sells the piece Ezriel cares about most, which is choosing which children share a room so a school needs fewer teachers. We tested that piece today on a made-up school. It found the best one to three child moves in about a second.

What going without Akiva costs is speed and cover. One person takes 7 to 12 weeks to reach a pilot at one school; two take about 4 to 7. And someone has to answer when a director calls and you are away.

Update, 10 Nov: Han's package, read line by line

Han sent a prototype schedule tool, her written scheduling rules, and rules for 29 states plus New York City. I read all of the code. We have not run it, so her results on four schools are her claims until we reproduce them.

Her written rules are the valuable part. Shift lengths, lunches, prep time, lead guides, floaters and room combining are each decided and written down.
Her code is a rough prototype. About 400 lines, no tests. It covers one standard day, not a week, and has no real people in it.
Weak points found in the code. It cannot tell a good answer from one cut off by its time limit. It weighs people against hours differently from what her notes say. It uses one ratio per room and ignores each child's age. It rounds head counts to the nearest child, not up. It assumes every lead guide is qualified.
Her state rules were copied from a research document, not from the regulations. Her own note says Legal must confirm them.
She and Ezriel disagree on three things, listed under "What we need from Ezriel".

Her notes also mention about 60 schools and a written requirements document we have not seen. Ezriel said 40 schools on the call.

How to read the difficulty marks

simple real work, well understood hard, needs rounds with real people or real data do not attempt yet

"Build" means we write it. "Buy" means an existing product does it. "Copy" means a proven public method exists and we follow it.

Groundwork (needed before any phase)

Ordinary software

Step	What has to be done	How hard
Get the children's data	Pull each child's name, birth date, room, start and end dates, and every check-in and check-out from Illumine. Keep an untouched copy of everything received. Illumine sells this access only on its top plan and publishes no instructions, so we have not seen it yet. Until we do, phase 1 can run on spreadsheet exports.	Build · unknown until seen
The rule book	Every ratio, group size, age cut-off, mixed-age rule and nap rule goes in as a setting with a start date and the law it comes from. Careful work, not clever work. Two surprises from the research: New York City has different rules from New York State, and there are at least four different ways states handle mixed ages.	Build · copy the method
Schools, rooms, staff, logins	A list of schools, rooms and people. Who is a lead (salaried, fixed to a room) and who is an assistant (hourly). Each director sees only their school; head office sees all.	Build · buy the sign-in
Hosting and security	One database, one website, daily backups, a security check before go-live.	Copy

Phase 1: the weekly schedule

75–80% of his saving · about 40 users

Each director receives a finished schedule two weeks ahead. They only put names into slots. Below is every step, in order, checked against his message, the call and Han's package.

What goes in

Step	Exactly what is involved	How hard
1. Attendance history	Each child, each day: room, check-in, check-out. Cleaning rules for bad records: a missing check-out becomes the child's usual pickup time; a check-in to the wrong room counts in the child's own room; holiday-type days are dropped. Han found 5 to 20 percent of check-outs missing.	Build · Han has it for spreadsheet exports
2. School set-up	Rooms, the program in each room, room capacity, opening hours, nap times, and which licence each program sits under.	Build
3. Staff list	Name, role, home room, full or part time, hourly or salaried. New: each person's qualifications, and who may hold a room alone or close the building.	Build · not in Han's tool
4. Today's schedule	Each person's start, end, lunch, prep, room and other duties, typed in as data. Schools keep these in Word, Excel and PDF, all different.	Build
5. Rule book	For each of 30 places: ratio and group size per program, how mixed ages are counted (18 different methods), nap rules, special cases. Plus company rules: allowed shifts, lunch and prep rules, when rooms may combine. Each with its date and legal source.	Build · Han's file is the starting point

The scheduling brain

Step	Exactly what is involved	How hard
6. Planning head count	Children in each room every 15 minutes, taken from a busy day and scaled up to full enrolment. Still to add: a separate pattern per weekday, and a two-week look-ahead for birthdays, new children and leavers.	Build · Han has a simple version
7. Ratio for each room	The state's ratio, or the company's where the state exempts the room. The real requirement is harder: work it out every 15 minutes from the birth date of each child present, using that state's own method.	Build · Han has one ratio per room only
8. Adults needed	Children divided by ratio, rounded up, for each room every 15 minutes, with nap-time and start-and-end-of-day allowances where the state gives them.	Build · Han has it
9. Room configuration	Which children sit in which room, so no room is one child over a ratio step and pickup times are grouped. Output is a short list of moves with the saving. This is Ezriel's headline. Han's tool leaves it out on purpose. We tested it on made-up data on 9 Nov.	Build · waits on Ezriel's ruling
10. Combining rooms early and late	Rooms of the same program share one room at the start and end of the day while the children fit and only if it saves an adult. Still to add: the child-by-child move list, and mixing age groups late in the day.	Build · Han has a simple version
11. Allowed shifts	The fixed list of shift shapes the schedule may use. Han: 8 paid hours or 4, nothing else.	Settings
12. Building the daily schedule	One lead guide per room; assistants only where a second adult is needed; a shared pool of floaters. Checked every 15 minutes: enough adults, never both of a room's adults away, lead guide present in the Montessori work periods. Aim: fewest people, then fewest paid hours.	Rebuild · Han's logic as the guide
13. Lunch and prep	Lunch 2 to 5 hours into a shift, ending at least an hour before it ends. Lead-guide prep 30 minutes at the same time every day.	Build · Han has it
14. Floater routes	For each floater: which room, covering whose lunch or prep, at what time, with as few room changes as possible.	Build · Han has a simple version
15. Independent check	A separate, simpler check of any schedule: minutes under ratio, spare adult time, and broken rules. Run on the school's current schedule and on ours.	Build · Han has it
16. From one day to a real week	Named people, time off, at least 30 hours a week for full-timers, no overtime, and as few changes from last week as possible.	Build · not in Han's tool

What the director and head office see

Step	Exactly what is involved	How hard
17. Change plan	For each person: today's shift, the new shift, and what changes. Lead guides keep their rooms. Lists shifts that end and jobs to post.	Build · Han has it
18. Director's screen and report	Today's schedule with its problems, the new schedule, and the change plan. The director puts names in slots and handles exceptions; anything costing overtime goes to head office.	Build
19. Call-outs and substitutes	When someone is out: keep the schedule, move only substitutes and floaters.	Build · not in Han's tool
20. Send it out	Weekly, two weeks ahead, by email and printable. Han adds: each person hears their change face to face first.	Buy the email service
21. Head-office control	Edit the rule book with a history; see all schools; hours before and after as proof of saving; logins and security.	Build
22. Getting a director to accept it	Rounds with the pilot school until the schedule is one they will run.	Not code

Size: our earlier estimate was 200–350 working hours to a pilot at one school, then 120–205 hours to roll out. Han's rules save design time. Steps 3, 7 and 16 add work that was not in that estimate. I have not re-sized it yet.

Phase 2: the live day

He definitely wants it

As children arrive early, stay late or do not come, the director is told "this room is about to be short" or "these two rooms can merge and an assistant can go."

Step	What has to be done	How hard
1. Live check-ins	Receive each check-in and check-out from Illumine within a minute or so.	Build · depends on Illumine
2. Live room picture	Children really present against the plan. It knows which teachers are scheduled, not which are standing in the room. The main danger is wrong data: a parent forgets to sign out and the system sees a child who is not there.	Build
3. Decide what to do	Re-run the phase 1 brain for the rest of the day, following a fixed order agreed in advance: who covers a gap, who is offered to leave first. Before anyone is sent home, the director taps to confirm a head count.	Build · copy the playbook idea
4. Tell people	Alerts on the director's screen and the room iPads (teachers' phones are put away), with texts for urgent ones. Only interrupt when someone must act now, or people stop looking.	Buy texting · copy alert rules
5. Stay up	If Illumine or the internet goes down, every screen says "not watching, follow today's plan" and we get a text. The weekly plan still stands.	Build

Existing childcare products only alert after a room is already out of ratio. None of them predicts it or suggests a merge. Size: not estimated yet; it needs one look at Illumine's live feed first.

Phase 3: clock to payroll

At most ~$200k a year

Buy almost all of it from whichever payroll company he picks. Their clock, timesheets, corrections and overtime rules already exist.

Step	What has to be done	How hard
Clock, timesheets, corrections, overtime	Use the payroll company's own.	Buy
Connect our schedule to it	Send our schedule in so their system flags missed punches. Pull punches back for the live screen and for a report of scheduled, punched and paid hours.	Build
Paying to the real leaving time	This is a policy, not technology. When someone leaves without punching out, the director enters the real time the same day and the employee can dispute it. A lawyer in each state has to approve the wording.	Policy · lawyer signs off

Time-sensitive. He is choosing payroll within two weeks. Payroll companies that let a customer send hours in directly: Rippling, UKG Ready, ADP Workforce Now, Paylocity. Gusto does not. He should get that access confirmed in writing before signing.

Phase 4: badges and room tracking

Recommend not building

Step	What has to be done	How hard
Staff badges and room sensors	Hospital-grade equipment, roughly $8k–$16k per school per year. For 40 schools that is more than the $200k it could save. Never used in childcare. If operations insists on knowing who is in a room, a "here / not here" tap on the room iPad does most of it for almost nothing.	Skip

Why it will not break with 40 directors and 800 staff

The load is small

Even with every room iPad refreshing, the system handles fewer than 20 requests a second at its busiest. One modest server carries that. This is arithmetic, not yet a live test.

Phase 1 cannot fail in the morning

The schedule is made once a week, in the background. If our system is down on a Tuesday, the schedule already emailed still stands.

Rules are settings, checked on every change

A new state or a changed ratio is typed into the rule book, not programmed. Each state's own worked examples are stored as tests. A wrong entry is refused before it can reach a schedule.

Every schedule is checked twice

The brain makes the schedule. A separate, much simpler checker confirms every room is in ratio at every 15 minutes before a director sees it.

The live phase fails safely

When data stops arriving, screens say so and people follow the plan. Nobody is sent home on the system's word alone.

We buy what others do well

Payroll clock, texting, email and sign-in come from established companies. We build only what nobody sells.

What is still unproven

Nothing has run on a real school's data. Every test so far used made-up children.
Han's tool has not been run by us, and we have not seen the real school files behind her results.
We have not seen Illumine's data access or the written requirements document Han refers to.
Han's state rules were copied from a research document, not from the regulations themselves. Legal has to confirm them.
Counting each child by date of birth, the way each state requires for mixed ages, is not in Han's engine. States use more than a dozen different methods.
Akiva's "4 to 8 weeks for phases 1 and 2 together" is not supported by our estimates.

What we need from Ezriel

The written requirements document Han refers to, and the real attendance and schedule files for her test schools. She will send the files once a data agreement is in place.
A ruling on room changes. On the call the software rebalances rooms; Han's written rule says it never does.
A ruling on shift lengths. On the call shifts vary and an assistant can go home early; Han allows only 8-hour and 4-hour shifts.
A ruling on the buffer. His message asks for the second teacher slightly before the ratio step; Han switched that off because it cost an extra person.
Illumine access: the licence, the instructions and a test account.
One pilot school and its director's time.
Is the planned end-of-day room merge part of phase 1 or phase 2?
Who approves moving a child to another room, and who tells the parent?
Who at head office owns the rules and can hold directors to the plan?

First thing to build

One real school, start to finish: its Illumine data in, room set-up and shifts out, the director's screen, the email. That single run on real data tells us more than any further planning, and it is the pilot's first week.