Documentation

Welcome to Shibutz

Shibutz is a student placement tool designed for elementary schools. It helps administrators and teachers create balanced classroom lists by distributing students across classrooms while respecting friend requests, behavioral scales, gender balance, and other constraints.

Whether you're splitting a single grade into two classes or reorganizing an entire school, Shibutz automates the tedious parts so you can focus on what matters most — your students.

Quick Start

Follow these steps to generate your first placement:

1. Create an account— Sign up with your email address and verify it. You'll land on the dashboard immediately.
2. Create a placement workspace — Start from the dashboard and give the workspace a grade, cohort, or school-year name your team will recognize. Each dashboard workspace card opens from anywhere on the card and shows its current student and classroom counts, so you can spot which lists still need setup. Shibutz will then point you to the two essentials for a useful placement: students and classrooms. See Managing Classrooms for details.
3. Add students — Enter students manually or import them from an Excel file. See Managing Students for details on attributes and import format.
4. Add classrooms — Create the destination classrooms students can be placed into. See Managing Classrooms for classroom names, teachers, notes, and capacity settings.
5. Add preferences & restrictions when needed — Define which students should stay together (Preferences) and which should be separated (Restrictions). You can add these after the first placement if you want to start by checking the roster and classrooms first.
6. Generate — Click Generate Placement and let the algorithm do the heavy lifting. Review the placement result and export to Excel when you're satisfied.

Key Features

Balanced Placement

The algorithm distributes students evenly across classrooms, taking into account gender ratios, support needs flags, and overall headcount so no single classroom is overloaded.

Friend Optimization

Each student can request up to three friends. The algorithm maximizes the number of fulfilled friend requests across all classrooms while still respecting hard constraints like restrictions and gender balance.

Scale Balancing

Students are rated on four scales — social, emotional, behavioral, and learning — using Low need, Watch, and High need labels. The algorithm ensures each classroom gets a comparable mix, so one classroom doesn't end up with a disproportionate number of students who need extra support.

Required Placements

Need a specific student in a specific classroom? Use Required Placements to lock them in before the algorithm runs.

Constraint Health

The workspace overview page includes a Constraint Health card that automatically detects conflicts between preferences, restrictions, and required placements — such as contradictory pairs, impossible separation requirements, or required-placement mismatches. Problems are flagged before you run the algorithm, so you can fix issues early instead of wondering why results look wrong.

Excel Import & Export

Import your student roster from an existing spreadsheet and export the final placement results back to Excel for printing or sharing with staff. See Exporting to Excel for format details.

Where to go next

Use the workflow map at the top of the docs when you want the full path. If you already know what you need, jump by phase:

• Set up the workspace — Add students and classrooms before adding placement rules.
• Add the rules — Capture friend preferences, separation restrictions, required placements, and placement settings.
• Review the result — Generate placements, read the results, check how the algorithm works, and export to Excel.

Ready to get started? Head to your dashboard and create your first placement workspace.