What time will the opening and closing bells ring at schools across Boston next fall?
According to school officials, who are working with a team of MIT researchers to redesign school schedules — the same researchers who helped develop new bus routes this fall — there are 1.8 octodecillion possibilities. That’s nearly three times the estimated number of grains of sand in the world, according to school officials.
“It’s a very complicated puzzle,” said John Hanlon, the school system’s chief of operations, noting that changing school start times has huge ripple effects on the deployment of buses.