For principals
Class placement software built for principals
You are the person who signs off on the class lists, fields the phone call from the parent who disagrees, and answers to staff when one room ends up carrying too much. Shibutz gives you a single workspace to run that decision, see the balance in each room before you commit, and explain the reasoning when someone pushes back.
What makes placement hard for a principal
The work is rarely about the software. It is about holding a dozen competing priorities at once while the summer clock runs down.
One room quietly absorbs the hardest mix
When lists are built by hand, it is easy to end up with a single class carrying most of the high-support readers, the behavior flags, and the new-teacher assignment all at once. You often catch it only after the year starts.
Parent requests arrive faster than you can track them
Keep-together notes, separation requests, and "please not that teacher" emails pile up across inboxes and sticky notes. By August you are trying to remember which promises you actually made.
You cannot explain a list you did not build yourself
When a grade team hands you the final draft, you inherit every judgment call without the context behind it. Defending a placement you cannot trace is uncomfortable, especially in a tense meeting.
How Shibutz fits a principal’s job
Choose a placement owner to collect grade-team input and prepare the roster. You set the rules and keep the final review.
- 1
Set the placement rules everyone works inside
Decide the class size targets, the boy-girl balance limit, and which support scales matter for this grade. The team then works inside those guardrails instead of relitigating them per student.
See placement settings - 2
Capture staff judgment as explicit rules
Keep-together pairs, keep-apart pairs, and locked placements live as constraints, not as memory. When a parent request comes in, it becomes a rule you can point to later.
Read about separation rules - 3
Review the balance per classroom before you commit
Generated lists come with per-class statistics for size, gender, and support load, so you can catch the overloaded room before it becomes September’s problem.
Understand placement results
A placement week that does not eat your July
Picture the last week of the school year. Your grade teams have added their students, flagged the friendships that matter, and noted the two children who need to be in different rooms. You set the class size to 24 and the gender balance limit, then run the generator.
The results show three second-grade classes. One room has more students needing behavioral support, so you review the roster and rules, make an approved change, and generate another draft to compare.
When a parent calls in August about a separation request, you open the class, see the keep-apart rule you recorded in June, and confirm it held. The answer takes a minute because the reasoning was never in your head alone.
Questions from principals
- Do I have to enter all the student data myself?
- No. A designated placement owner can collect grade-level input and prepare the roster in their account. Review the saved roster and draft with the owner before approving the lists.
- Can I explain a placement to a parent who disagrees?
- Yes. Keep-together and keep-apart requests are stored as explicit rules on each class, so you can open the placement and show exactly which constraint applied instead of relying on memory.
- How is this different from doing it in a spreadsheet?
- A spreadsheet holds names but not the reasoning. Shibutz keeps the roster, the constraints, the generated lists, and the per-class balance in one place, so you can regenerate and compare instead of manually reshuffling rows.
- What happens if one class comes back unbalanced?
- Review the class statistics, update the roster or placement rules, and generate another draft. Compare the results before deciding which lists to approve.
- Can we try Shibutz before paying?
- Yes. Free includes 1 class list, up to 25 students per class list, and 3 placement generations per class list. Pro is $199/year and includes unlimited class lists, students, and placement generations, XLSX export for staff review, and billing management for invoices, payment details, and subscription status. Compare Free and Pro on the pricing page.
Know where student data goes.
Before adding a roster, understand how Shibutz uses your information and check your school's privacy requirements.
- Sign-in and profile
- Clerk handles account sign-in and the profile details you choose to save.
- Roster and results
- Your rosters, placement rules, settings, and saved results are linked to your account.
- Generation and export
- When you generate or export a placement, the Shibutz placement service processes the roster and placement details needed for that request.
- School approval
- Use only student information your school has authorized you to share. Review our privacy details before uploading a roster.
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Run your next placement without losing a weekend
Collect your teams’ input, set placement rules, and review draft lists you can explain.