Certainly there are an awful lot of startups that fail over issues like this. They either invest massive effort into seeking technical fixes that don't exist for human problems, or they find genuinely superior technical answers that are impossible to achieve - because they upset key parties, or because the cost of change is too high, or because they just sound too damn silly to sell people on.

But in this case, I'm not sure there was anything to be done. (As you acknowledge - I'm not disagreeing, just looking at the point.) Two grad students whose background was overwhelmingly technical were brought in to provide a technical solution. They had enormous amounts of logistical information, but it's not clear they had social/political information about their task, and certainly they had no control over messaging and notification.

The outrage appears to have been less about the use of an algorithm than about massive disruptions to schedules. It's a predictable outcome - school start times are largely set around common parent work schedules - but it's also an irreducible one. The desired outcome was the source of the anger, however much the computer derivation added insult to injury. Doctors have been calling for these changes for years and been utterly ignored. The school district I grew up in tried something a lot like this a decade ago, with no fancy algorithm, and was slapped down with similar fury.

At a certain point I think the error was not the superintendent seeking a technical solution to changing start times, but seeking a solution at all on a topic where parents didn't want change.

(If I were to really get inflammatory, I might mention that school is a classic principal-agent problem, and the proposal failed because it tried to trade the agents' convenience for the principals' health. But that's another, uglier debate.)