How Heads of School Build a Fall Course Catalog (A Mid-July Field Guide)

TL;DR

• A fall course catalog isn't written in July — it's confirmed in July. The real build ran from spring course requests through section tallies, and mid-July is when a head of school finds out which sections actually filled and which quietly died.
• The hardest decision on the list is the singleton: the elective with nine committed students and no teacher to spare. Cutting it is the default, and it's the cut families notice most.
• There is now a third option besides "hire someone" and "cut it." A supervised, AI-tutored elective carrying real Carnegie-Unit credit can be added to the catalog in July — after the hiring window has closed — for a fraction of a teaching seat.

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If you lead a small private school, you know the specific dread of the third week of July.

The catalog has to go to families. The master schedule has to be built against it. And sitting in your inbox is a request tally telling you that Personal Finance drew eleven students, Psychology drew nine, and neither has a teacher — because the person who could have taught them left in April and you didn't backfill the line.

Most of the guidance you'll find on building a course catalog was written for university registrars or 2,000-student public districts with a scheduling office. It assumes staff you don't have and enrollment you don't have. This is the version for a school of 90 to 400 students, where the head of school is the scheduling office.

What Is a Fall Course Catalog — and Who Actually Builds It?

The course catalog is the published list of what your school will teach next year: every course, its credit value, its prerequisites, and the grades it's open to. It's the document families read on your website, the one an accreditor pulls when they visit, and the one admissions hands to a touring parent.

At a large school, a registrar owns it and a scheduling committee feeds it. At a small private school, the honest org chart is: the head of school owns it, an academic dean or lead teacher helps, and the whole thing lives in a spreadsheet that one person understands.

That matters because the catalog is not really a publishing task. It's a resource-allocation decision wearing a publishing task's clothes. Every line in it is a claim on a teacher's load, a room, and a period in the day. When you add a course, something else moves.

When Should a Private School Finalize Its Fall Course Catalog?

The working calendar at most small schools looks roughly like this:

• February–March: Students submit course requests for next year.
• March–April: You tally the requests, decide which courses run, and how many sections each needs.
• April–May: Teaching assignments go out. Hiring decisions for any gaps get made here — this is the window, and it closes quietly.
• June: Summer melt. Enrollment shifts, a family withdraws, a teacher resigns, and last spring's tallies stop being true.
• Mid-July: The catalog is confirmed and published. The master schedule gets built against it. Section cancellations get communicated.
• August: First day. Whatever's in the catalog, you're teaching.

The trap is treating July as a formality. It isn't — it's the first moment you're working with real numbers instead of spring projections. Public districts run low-enrollment reports two to four weeks before term start and cancel under-filled sections then. Small private schools do the same thing, less formally, in a July spreadsheet.

Which means mid-July is not too late to change the catalog. It's the last moment you legitimately can — and it's the last moment you're allowed to add.

How Do You Decide Which Courses Make the Catalog?

Four constraints decide it, and they're evaluated in this order:

1. Graduation requirements. Anything a senior needs to walk in May is non-negotiable. It goes on the catalog first, whatever it costs.
2. Staff capacity. Not headcount — load. Who is certified or credible in the subject, and do they have a period free? A teacher already at a full load is not capacity, no matter how willing they are.
3. Section viability. Will enough students actually take it? Most small schools carry an informal floor somewhere between eight and twelve students before a section stops paying for itself.
4. Facilities. A lab, a studio, an instrument, a room during the right period.

Everything that clears all four is easy. The catalog is decided by what clears three of the four — which is almost always electives that have the students and lack the teacher.

Build the schedule around singletons first — the courses running in only one section. They have the least flexibility and cause the most downstream conflicts. If you place your flexible, multi-section courses first, you'll discover in August that the only period Psychology could run is the period every junior has Chemistry.

What Do You Do About the Elective That Won't Fill a Section?

This is the decision. Nine students want Personal Finance. You have no one to teach it.

The options, honestly stated:

• Cut it. Free, instant, and the default. It's also the line item a family remembers on their exit interview, and the reason a prospective parent picks the larger school. You've saved a teaching seat and paid for it in admissions.
• Hand it to an existing teacher. Free on the budget, expensive on the human. Your strongest teacher picks up a fifth prep for a subject outside their training. It works for a year. Then they burn out, and replacing them costs far more than the elective ever would have.
• Run it every other year. Stretches thin staff, but tells a sophomore they may never get the course before they graduate.
• Hire for it. A specialized elective teacher runs $47,000–$70,000 fully loaded. Split across nine students, the per-seat math is indefensible — and in mid-July, the hiring window is closed anyway. Nobody good is available.
• À-la-carte online academies. Real, but typically $229–$595 per student per course, with no supervision layer tying back to your school and no dashboard your faculty can see. You've outsourced the teaching and the oversight — a hard thing to defend to an accreditor.

We wrote about the structural version of this problem in how small private schools solve the elective gap, and the full per-student comparison lives in what a modern elective program costs per student.

How Do You Add Courses in July Without Hiring?

Here's the reframe that changes the July decision: sort your catalog into two buckets.

Bucket 1 — mission and formation courses. Worldview, theology, ethics, your signature humanities sequence, fine arts. These stay with your faculty, permanently. They're why families chose you instead of the school down the road. No outside provider touches them.

Bucket 2 — practical and career electives. Personal Finance, Psychology, Public Speaking, Entrepreneurship, Computer Science, Health Science, Career Exploration. These are what families keep asking for, what rounds out a transcript, and what a small school almost never has staff to teach well.

You only have to solve Bucket 2. And Bucket 2 doesn't require your specific faculty — it requires a rigorous course, a credible credit, and a supervising adult who can see that students are doing the work.

That's the model Elective Genius is built on. A student works through a self-paced, mastery-based course with Meri, an AI tutor embedded in every lesson that holds a guided conversation and pushes back when a student types a one-word answer. Your faculty member supervises rather than teaches: a supervisor dashboard shows live progress, rubric-graded assignments, and journal entries. One existing staff member can oversee students across 30+ courses in 6 career pathways — Healthcare, Business & Finance, Technology, Law & Society, Creative & Communication, and Life & Career Readiness.

The operational point for a July catalog build: there's no hire, so there's no hiring window. Adding Personal Finance to your catalog on July 20 is a scheduling decision, not a staffing one. At school pricing of $149/student/year — $129 at 25+ seats, $109 at 50+, with a founding-school rate of $99/student for year one for the first ten schools, the nine-student singleton stops being a budget question.

Does an Outsourced Elective Still Count for Credit?

The first question every accreditor-minded head of school asks, and correctly.

Every Elective Genius course is standards-aligned and Carnegie Unit compliant, earning real high school credit with printable transcripts. The supervision layer is what makes it defensible: your faculty member remains the adult of record, with visible evidence of student work — not a completion certificate from a vendor you can't inspect. We go deeper on the compliance specifics in Carnegie Unit compliance for AI-delivered courses, and on the oversight tooling in supervisor dashboards vs. LMS.

Worth naming: completion is the whole pitch. Most online electives post 15–25% completion rates industry-wide. A course nobody finishes isn't a catalog line — it's a liability you have to explain in May.

Your Mid-July Catalog Checklist

• Re-run request tallies against current enrollment, not spring projections.
• Flag every section under your viability floor.
• For each flagged section, ask: cut, absorb, or supervise?
• Place singletons in the master schedule first.
• Separate mission electives (keep in-house) from practical electives (supervisable).
• Confirm every graduation-requirement course has a teacher with actual load available.
• Publish — and make sure the catalog a touring family reads in August is one you're proud of.

Start Your Pilot

If you're staring at a July tally with electives you can't staff, you don't have to cut them.

Elective Genius runs a 14-day free pilot (10-student minimum) with dedicated onboarding for school plans. Schools that start now are live for day one of fall.

Start Your Pilot — or see how the school plan works and we'll walk your actual catalog gaps with you. Full seat pricing is on the pricing page.

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About the author

Steve Smith is the founder of Genius Learning and Elective Genius. He's a school leader himself — the platform runs at his own school across grades 6–12, which means every feature was built against a real master schedule, a real budget, and a real July deadline. He built Elective Genius after watching small schools cut the courses students wanted most, for reasons that had nothing to do with what was good for students.