Timetabling problems look to schedule meetings in order to satisfy a set of demands, while respecting additional constraints. In a good solution the resulting timetables are acceptable to all people and resources involved. In school timetabling, a given number of lectures, involving students, teachers and classrooms, need to be scheduled over the week, while having to satisfy operational, institutional, pedagogical and personal restrictions. The difficulty of the problem has driven many researchers to work on solving approaches for it since the early 1960 s. Finding an actual solution to a real world scenario implies satisfying many quality requirements and not ignoring the political issues, which turns the classical problem much more intricate. This work describes an approach based on mixed integer programming (MIP) developed for solving a real-world school timetabling problem and discusses ideas and issues faced during solution deployment phase for some Brazilian schools. In contrast to other works on school timetabling, teaching staff sharing between distinct school units are considered. Computational experiments were performed for scenarios whose number of school units varies from 2 to 15, number of teachers varies from 35 to 471 and number of classes varies from 16 to 295. Different strategies were combined aiming at converging to good solutions. Finally, results are evaluated and the best approaches are highlighted.