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11 Questions (& Answers) All About Section 504

In a recent webinar with Dave Richards and Jose Martín, they answered audience questions about Section 504.

Turns out, everyone has a lot of questions about Section 504.

Below you’ll find a few questions that came up from the audience during the webinar. Tune in to the on demand version to hear directly from Dave and Jose as they answer even more questions about this important legislation.

1. “The question that always comes up in our district is diagnosis. We have a student who cannot concentrate, gets in trouble due to socialization in class but we don’t have a diagnosis. Can we say that it appears that the student has ADHD?”

Answer: A 504 committee has to substantiate its findings of impairment based on various sources of data, but the data sources do not have to include a private clinical diagnosis. If, however, there are various data sources indicating atypical impulsivity, hyperactivity, inattentiveness, then a committee can make a determination of ADHD, which is not a diagnosis, but an educational determination.

2. “What about a medical disability? Anxiety? Can a team determine this disability through data?”

Answer: ADHD is primarily diagnosed, even in the medical field, through symptomatology. Physical medical conditions or more complex mental conditions like anxiety or bipolar disorder are more difficult to ascertain with mere informal data. Thus, if those conditions are suspected, schools may need to either pay for a medical evaluation or refer the child to IDEA.

3. “If ADHD doesn’t need a medical source to be used to establish the eligibility for 504 Plan, how is this not a suspected disability?”

Answer:The suspicion of disability is required to trigger the school’s responsibility to offer an evaluation under Section 504 (if the school also suspects that the student needs services because of the disability). The committee can determine that the student has ADHD on the basis of data from a variety of sources, which may include medical data (but is not required to include medical data).

4. “Schools are not supposed to diagnose, so how do you document the disability if there is not an ADHD diagnosis. Can the school record ‘data shows significant attention concerns’? How is this different than disability vs. difficulty?”

Answer: In the Office for Civil Rights’ ADHD Resource Guide, there is reference to the school’s finding of disability without a medical diagnosis as a “determination” not as a diagnosis. We refer to it in the forms as an “educational determination.”

5. “If a student is unable to pass any of the 5 end-of-course assessments (EOCs), is that a good reason to refer for an full individual evaluation to Special Education?”

Answer: It can be if the school suspects that the student has an impairment that fits one of the disability categories under IDEA and believes that the student needs specially designed instruction. Failure to pass EOCs by itself is a single source of data. I’d also be interested in knowing how the student is performing in the subject matter in class.

6. “I was told counselor cannot be written in the 504 Plan because all students have access to the counselor. Is that true?”

Answer: Even if counseling is normally provided to all students as needed, if a student with a Section 504 Plan needs it, it must be set forth in the plan so that the provision of service is accorded the force of federal law. Otherwise, the student may or may not get it, and parents cannot enforce its provision.

7. “How should we address chronic absenteeism in students with a 504 Plan? How do expectations change in regard to truancy or do they? Many times, it is difficult to separate absences related to the disability and absences that are not. Can you still require the student to follow attendance procedures for excusal of absences?”

Answer: If a student’s disability is known to impact attendance, it may be discriminatory to penalize the student under truancy or attendance policies. Accommodations and services in 504 Plans can assist students with disability-related attendance issues (e.g., counseling, BIP, working with parents). If it appears difficult to determine if the absences are disability-related or 504 is not working, an IDEA referral may be needed.

8. “Would toy guns fall under weapon exclusion?”

Answer: It can be if the school suspects that the student has an impairment that fits one of the disability categories under IDEA and believes that the student needs specially designed instruction. Failure to pass EOCs by itself is a single source of data. I’d also be interested in knowing how the student is performing in the subject matter in class.

9. “For manifestation determination review (MDR) when you speak of Procedural Safeguards provided to the parent, are you referring to Procedural Safeguards explaining rights under IDEA or does 504 have Procedural Safeguards?”

Answer: Section 504 procedural safeguards, which are more limited than IDEA rights. See 34 CFR 104.36.

10. “If we do yearly meetings and go over the plan with the parents and teachers, do we still need to do an evaluation every three years?”

Answer: No. Those yearly meetings usually review current grades, statewide assessment scores, teacher observations, behavior records, and parent input, if not more. Thus, this is a review of various sources of data which is really a Section 504 reevaluation. Since you are doing these annually, you will never have to do a 3-year re-eval.

11. “Can students with Section 504 Plans be placed in special education classes (ie. study skills in high school taught by a special education teacher)?”

Answer: Not if the special education teacher is special education funded and only special education kids participate in the class. That would be use of IDEA funds for non-IDEA students.

If you want to dive deeper and learn how Frontline can help your district navigate Section 504, check this out –>

Webinar Takeaways: EdTech Innovations that Retain Top Talent

With tightening teacher pipelines and higher rates of attrition, how can K-12 leaders utilize modern technology to help overcome the challenges associated with the teacher shortage?

Frontline recently joined industry experts from interviewstream and Wagestream to discuss ground-breaking innovations in education technology, and how districts can leverage these tools to advance their immediate and long-term goals to recruit, grow, and retain highly qualified educators.

Webinar Speakers

Monique Mahler
CEO, interviewstream
Joey Vasser
Client Success Account Manager, interviewstream
Portman Wills
Co-Founder, Wagestream
Kevin Agnello
Sr. Data Analytics Engineer, Frontline Education
Nichelle Smith
Leader of HCM Product Marketing, Frontline Education

A better way to hire

Frontline Recruiting & Hiring + interviewstream

Recruiting, hiring, and onboarding are all steps you take to bring the best talent into your district. They’re critically important, but also time consuming! Tasks like filtering through applications or managing interviews can quickly add up… and paper only further complicate things. Not only can that mean lost time for more strategic work, but it can also even mean losing out on great candidates.

In order to avoid getting bogged down by manual processes and to ensure the entire hiring process is smooth-sailing, districts can utilize modern recruiting tools like on-demand interviews. In this webinar, interviewstream discusses various ways these asynchronous, self-paced styled interviews can help K-12 HR proactively engage with candidates on their own time (and get to hiring that much faster).

Handpicked content:

Recruiting the 21st Century Teacher

What are the benefits of on-demand interviews for K-12?

On-demand interviews and other recruiting tools can help K-12 HR teams optimize and streamline the entire recruiting process! Districts can expand their geographical reach to attract even more candidates, provide a more candidate-friendly interviewing experience, and make better hiring decisions to fill open positions with qualified talent.

Increase flexibility for candidates: Candidates can interview anytime and anywhere (and they can even rerecord the video if they didn’t get it right the first time).
Empower your HR team: Automate interview scheduling, rewatch live interviews to rate candidates, and score interviews in real time.
Maximize your schedule: Get time back from scheduling interviews, handling manual candidate information, and rallying your HR team together to perform assessments.

“Leveraging solutions from Recruiting & Hiring and interviewstream enabled us to expand our candidate pool, offer every candidate a screening interview and move candidates through the hiring cycle process efficiently, so we can quickly fill open positions with qualified candidates allowing us to continue to fulfill our mission.”

Julie Tobin, Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources at Community School District 93.

Myth: On-demand interviews won’t get responded to.

Fact: It’s actually on the contrary! Monique shared that “70% of candidates respond to an on-demand interview in just four days and 93% have completed within a week.”

How can you leverage this tech beyond recruiting?

The benefits don’t just stop at getting great candidates in the door. Districts can leverage on-demand videos to continually engage their staff to help boost retention rates. Whether it’s supporting teacher collaboration and mentoring or providing flexible professional development opportunities, this tool has the power to transform the entire learning experience! Here are a few additional ideas discussed in the webinar.

“You can use these interviews in unique ways you wouldn’t expect like teacher evaluations or curriculum planning.”

Monique Mahler

“There are other ways to utilize video interviews…like end of the year teacher awards and teacher feedback. It’s an easy way to engage your current staff which is such an important part of the retention process.”

Joey Vasser

Hear from interviewstream:

Related Resource:

Looking for other ways to leverage video tech in your district?
Check out 3 Ways Technology Can Help Overcome the Teacher Shortage

Flexible access to pay

Frontline Absence & Time + Wagestream

If you’re trying to increase the size of your substitute pool, chances are it’s because you’re struggling to find people to come in and cover absences. But the real problem may not be the size of your pool — it could be a fill rate issue, the unpredictability of teacher absences, or even the financial uncertainty that comes with the job.

In many districts, substitutes typically don’t have access to their earned wages until the next pay cycle. But the truth is, some individuals may not have the financial flexibility to wait for that paycheck. This can make it challenging for subs to manage finances, pay bills on time, or handle unexpected expenses.

What’s an easy way to remove that financial barrier to entry for substitutes in your district? One idea is to offer flexible access to their wages when they want it (as they earn it)! As inflation and rising interest rates continue to affect many people, control over one’s pay provides a genuine financial wellbeing benefit.

In the webinar, Wagestream discusses how to give substitutes in your district control over their pay to foster financial wellbeing and minimize stress.

“Offering flexible pay really helps with the vast majority of financial challenges. Whether it’s an unexpected expense or matching your incomings and outgoings, it has a wonderful impact for the worker.”

Portman Wills

Why is flexible pay important in K-12?

Bringing innovation like flexible access to pay into your district pay can incentivize substitutes to take more jobs and help support your efforts to being recognized as a destination district.

Improve substitute fill rates
Bring better financial control to your substitutes
Foster financial wellbeing and minimize stress

“The substitutes you are hiring, training, and working with…they are often working in other industries as well. A recent survey we conducted revealed that 86% of substitutes hold a second job and 55% hold three or more. The top three most frequent sources of income for these subs are McDonalds, Target, and Uber. They all offer flexible pay. With this tech, we can level the playing field for school districts.”

Portman Wills

Flex-pay fast facts!

According to a recent Wagestream survey:
Job vacancies are filled 27% faster Stress levels are improved by 75% Hours worked by subs increased by 22%

Hear from Wagestream:

Handpicked content:

How to Solve Shortages and Increase Substitute Effectiveness

Ready to improve the candidate experience with on demand interviews? Learn more

Ready to help attract and retain substitutes in your district with flexible access to pay? Learn more

8 KPIs Every School Business Official Should Track

School business is complex, with intricacies that affect revenue, compliance, and ultimately, student learning. As schools navigate all kinds of uncertainty (COVID! Inflation! Property values! Changing demographics! Government regulation!), it’s critically important to gauge where your district has been, and where it’s going in the future.

While there may be scores of key performance indicators (KPIs) that should inform a school district’s financial strategy, there are eight that are worth special attention, according to Derick Sibley. Derick is the Director of Finance and Accounting at Pleasant Grove ISD in Texarkana, TX. He has spent 19 years in public education, and 14 of those years in school business.

“If you don’t know where you’ve been, you don’t know where you’re going, and KPIs really paint that picture for you, to help you understand your district and how your district is performing. Are you heading in the right direction? Are you trending toward any kind of financial risk?”

Derick Sibley, Director of Finance and Accounting, Pleasant Grove ISD

Pleasant Grove ISD at a Glance:

Enrollment: 2300+

Employees: 265

Facilities: 4 campuses

KPIs to Track

Derick highlights the importance of monitoring trends in these KPIs — not just one-time snapshots. “If you don’t know your data, if you don’t know your trends, how are you going to know when you start to fall away from those?”

He says doing so is a good way to benchmark how you perform against peer districts. Because the data is public, and many states use them as part of their accountability standards or ratings, they may provide an opportunity to reach out to a neighboring district that is performing better on a certain KPI to ask what they’re doing to achieve certain results.

Here are the eight KPIs that Derick suggests are especially worth your attention.

8 KPIs to Track

Student Enrollment
Student-to-Teacher Ratio
Administrative Cost Ratio
Fund Balance to Expenditure/Revenue Ratio
Days of Cash on Hand
Expenditure-to-Revenue Ratio
Surplus/Deficit-to-Revenue/Expense Ratio
Debt Burden Ratio

Student Enrollment

Because student enrollment is tied to state funding and has a financial impact, it’s one of the simplest and most important numbers to watch. Understanding past as well as current enrollment can help you put together a 3–5-year financial forecast. Derick said, “When I start doing my five-year forecast, the first thing I look at is, ‘What is our enrollment? What is the average change in enrollment? What is the trend that I’m seeing?”

Derick suggests not just looking at overall enrollment, but also special student populations such as special education, career and technical education, and the portion of your student body that is economically disadvantaged. Since the beginning of the pandemic, enrollment has fluctuated for many districts, and subpopulations shifted as well. Tracking these numbers can help you determine program funding levels and staffing.

Student-to-Teacher Ratio

Student-to-teacher ratio is simply the number of enrolled students divided by teacher full-time employees (FTEs).

You should also track the percentage change in student enrollment as it relates to the percentage change in employed teacher FTEs.

It’s often helpful to choose a base year (5 or 10 years prior, for example), and monitor what is the percentage change student enrollment since that year, as well as the percentage change in certified staff since that year. Is there a difference between these two percentages? This can help you start to identify trends.

Ideally, you’ll see a steady and consistent trend. If you notice that the percentage change in teacher FTEs is increasing faster than your percentage change in student enrollment, that’s a warning sign (sometimes called “hitting the wall”) and could indicate that you’re headed toward financial trouble.

The ideal student-to-teacher ratio depends on district size. Large districts can often leverage economies of scale more than small districts, and a district with 20,000 students can likely be more efficient with administrative costs than a smaller district can.

One helpful way to tell how you’re doing is to compare your results to those of like districts across your state. Derick uses Frontline’s Comparative Analytics to see the average student-to-teacher ratio across his state, as well as across districts of different sizes, and in his local economy. This helps the district make decisions about class sizes and how competitive they should be with teacher salaries as they compete for talent with other local districts.

Listen to the Podcast!

Hear Derick Sibley and Frontline Senior Analytics Advisor Travis Zander discuss these KPIs on the Field Trip Podcast.

Administrative Cost Ratio

How much your district spends on administrative costs (principals, assistant principals, central administration, superintendents, assistant superintendents, the academic office, the business office, etc.) versus instructional costs (teachers, counselors, nurses, librarians, etc.) is another important KPI. Derick said it’s important not only to monitor this number, but also to use it to thoughtfully communicate with your community.

Because community members feel strongly that district funds should be used efficiently to impact instruction, showing that the cost ratio is consistent over time can be helpful. Also be sure to communicate how you monitor administrative costs, and the reasons for those expenditures. Those offices are all important, and many people may not be aware of everything the district does to operate, such as monitoring grant compliance, running payroll, and keeping the lights on.

Fund Balance to Expenditure/Revenue Ratio

This figure shows you how financially healthy your district is. The calculation is simple: take your end-of-year fund balance and divide it by your expenditures or revenue — what is the percentage?

>=25% – Low Risk; 0%-25% – Moderate Risk; <0% - High Risk
* Targets established by school district policy

Generally, aim to have at least 25% of your operating expenses on hand. “That helps me know on any given year that if the money flow stopped completely, I would have at least 25% of my expenditures covered in my fund balance,” said Derick.

Failing to monitor this ratio can lead to financial trouble as well. But be sure to look at your local governance and understand any local policies, as some may impact the amount of fund balance you are allowed to keep on hand.

Days of Cash on Hand

How long could you continue to operate if no additional revenue was received?

Would you have enough liquidity to make payroll until funds once again come into the district? This is especially important since funds don’t always flow into the district in equal increments throughout the year. Derick said his district doesn’t bring in much money between December and April, so he must plan ahead to ensure they can cover operating expenses during those months. “I look at it every day, cash on hand. How much do we have for operational purposes? How much do we have that are investments? Do we need to move things around? It’s monitored on a daily basis.”

Expenditure-to-Revenue Ratio

This KPI is like that question every young adult setting up their first budget has to grapple with: “Are we living below our means?” For every dollar received, how much is spent?

The calculation is simple: divide operating expenses by revenues — then be sure to track the trend over time.

Surplus/Deficit-to-Revenue/Expense Ratio

Did your district have a surplus of funds last year, or did you run a deficit? This KPI looks at it as a percentage of revenue or of expenditures.

This is often more useful than looking at the dollar amounts, especially if your district is growing or declining in enrollment, as you track it over time. Are you consistently adding 2% of revenue to the fund balance, for example?

Tracking this number can help you set and monitor long-term goals. Is this ratio consistent year over year? If not, it could be a sign that you need to revise some of your budgeting practices. Are you being consistent with your long-range financial planning?

Debt Burden Ratio

Similar to expenditure-to-revenue ratio, this KPI looks at how much is spent in debt service for every dollar received. Derick said this is helpful for communicating in a clear, simple way how much of the district’s revenue is spent on servicing debt.

How to Track Data Over Time

As Derick said, it’s critical to track these KPIs over time — not just look at them once. He looks at most of these KPIs on a monthly basis, and some on a daily basis. But while this is publicly available data, it’s not always easy to unearth, and it can be especially tedious to present the data visually in ways that bring it to life. In the past, this was time-consuming — digging up the data, going to multiple sources to find the figures he needed, and compiling it.

Now Derick uses Frontline Business Analytics, a system designed from the ground up to help school districts look at their financial data, create long-range financial plans, manage budgets, and compare data to other districts, either nearby or across the state, or with similar demographics.

“One of the best tools I believe is out there is the financial forecast I get out of Frontline Analytics. That is the basis of the conversation that I have with my superintendent every month. We look at the forecast that is put together in those financial reports, and so that gives us some idea when we start trying to make decisions about anything. ‘What does it look like? What does that forecast look like?’ … It takes your historical information, allows you to take a look at it, gives you a forecast based on what has actually happened in the past. What does that data allow us to do? It helps us to make better decisions.”

Derick Sibley

Those forecasts are helpful when answering tricky questions: If we add staff, what happens to our finances in the long term? If we pay a one-time stipend, how does that impact our end-of-year financials? How do our KPIs compare to other districts? Are we going in the right direction?

“What gives me comfort,” Derick said, “is knowing that the data, the decisions we’re making, are all based on realistic numbers.”

Board Communication

When he presents his forecasts and plans to the board, Derick works very hard to be simple, transparent, and thorough. He wants it to be simple enough that even someone with no experience in school finance could understand what he’s saying. So he shows information in multiple ways — not just in charts and graphs, but also with a narrative. “We talk all the time about how in the classroom, there are different learning styles and students learn in different ways….It’s the same for our school board, and it’s the same for our community.”

Derick uses Frontline Business Analytics not just to analyze the data, but also to create board communications. He frequently uses the monthly financial reports in the system and prints them out to include in his board packet. “I tell people all the time, it makes me look really smart. It’s pretty hefty, it’s a lot of information. And it looks like I put a lot of time into it.”

He tries to anticipate the questions the board will ask and includes information that will answer those questions. “I take that information and put together my narrative that I want to give the board. And then on top of that, I summarize it all. I have a summary sheet that I show the board, and then back behind the summary sheet is all the detailed information that if they want to take a look at, they can.”

Advice for Tracking KPIs

We asked Derick what his single biggest piece of advice for other school business officials would be as they work to get their arms around their data.

“Prior to having Frontline Analytics, I spent lots of time putting data together, looking through state and local reports and everything else I could possibly get my hands on to find a trend or find out where we’ve been. And when Frontline Analytics came along, and I have that data in my hand, I can tell that story, I can get that information in an instant. And so I would recommend looking at the data and finding out where your district has been. Frontline Analytics is an amazing tool that’s available to school districts and it will help you tremendously, help you get off the ground in understanding where you’re at.”

RTI/MTSS and End of School Year: 7 Pillars to Reflect on Your Program, Recalibrate Your Approach, and Energize Your Staff

For schools implementing an RTI/MTSS model, the end of the school year can be an energizing and pivotal time. Leaders implementing RTI/MTSS have a big responsibility, to deploy the school’s full array of intervention resources to find and help struggling students. Therefore, this model requires periodic checkups to ensure schools align their current practices with RTI/MTSS best practices. The close of school offers staff an ideal time to accomplish this goal by tidying up loose ends in record-keeping, using data to improve classroom instruction, identifying gaps between its intended and actual service delivery, and looking forward to the next phase in its RTI/MTSS program roll-out.

As summer approaches, here are seven steps schools can take to firm up RTI/MTSS procedures, ensure they are carried out with integrity — and prepare for the coming year.

Best Practices for Closing Out This Year & Preparing for Next Year

1. Archive Your RTI/MTSS Information

Schools should give all staff who have responsibility for keeping track of RTI/MTSS information a deadline for completing their records for the current school year before the summer break. Having a district or school-wide RTI/MTSS program management system accessible to all stakeholders helps keep data organized and archived for future use. After the deadline, the school should spot-check student entries in the RTI/MTSS system to verify records are complete.

Did you know?
When asked what challenges they faced in implementing RTI/MTSS, 42% of K-12 survey respondents reported that their RTI/MTSS process wasn’t documented well or wasn’t followed consistently.

2. Evaluate Effectiveness of Core Instruction

RTI/MTSS schools typically collect building-wide academic screening at fall, winter and spring checkpoints. These data-sets are invaluable, as they allow a school to judge the effectiveness of its core instruction and, when necessary, provide guidance to teachers on strengthening their instructional practices.

A rule of thumb is that classroom instruction across a school can be considered adequate if at least 80% of students meet or exceed a screener’s performance cut-points. The close of the school year is an ideal time for administrators to meet with grade-level teams to review screening data and brainstorm future instructional ideas to boost students’ collective academic performance.

Example:
If a grade-4 team discovers that 40% of its students routinely score below the expected cut-point on a reading-fluency screener, that team would generate ideas to promote increased fluency via instructional activities.

3. Analyze RTI/MTSS Data to Uncover Performance ‘Pockets’

As schools build a strong RTI/MTSS model, they collect troves of data monitoring student performance. If this data is reliably archived, schools can analyze it to identify pockets of student performance that either exceed or lag behind expectations.

Example:
A building might compare the relative outcomes of two Tier 2 reading groups using the same program to see if there are significant differences across instructors. Or a district might analyze the relative impact of several Tier 2 reading programs used in multiple schools to identify those with stronger versus weaker outcomes. Of course, this type of advanced RTI/MTSS ‘data mining’ requires a school or district first standardize its procedures. Standardizing processes will ensure data sources are valid and reliable, that interventionists collect data with frequency and rigor, and that student data is uniformly stored in electronic format for easy retrieval.

“Advanced RTI/MTSS ‘data mining’ requires a school or district first standardize its procedures.”

4. ‘Recalibrate’ Your RTI/MTSS Procedures

Every school that follows an RTI/MTSS model has its own procedures to identify students for services, document intervention plans, collect data, move students up and down the tiers of intervention, and so on. The end of the school year is an ideal time to review the school’s actual RTI/MTSS practices, identify any gaps in implementation, and ‘recalibrate’ to align those day-to-day practices with the expected RTI/MTSS procedures.

Example:
If the Tier 1 expectation at an elementary building is that teachers will employ weekly grade-level planning time to develop classroom intervention plans, that school can investigate actual practice to verify these teams are in fact using planning time for this purpose, examine sample intervention plans to ensure teachers include research-based intervention strategies, and check the RTI/MTSS data management system to certify classroom intervention plans are being entered electronically.

Data can help the school uncover discrepancies in procedures. It is an expectation, for example, that in a ‘typical’ school, 1-5% of students might be referred to the Tier 3 RTI/MTSS Problem-Solving Team in a given school year. If, as summer approaches, fully 10% of its students have been brought to Tier 3 during the current year, the school can follow up by reexamining its criteria for accepting a Tier 3 referral and the fidelity with which these criteria are being enforced.

5. Recruit Fall Groups Using End-of-Year Screeners

To identify students at academic risk, most schools screen the entire building population 3 times per year (fall/winter/spring). Those data are then used to recruit students whose risk profile indicates they require Tier 2/Tier 3 academic-intervention services. While fall screening data would appear to be the logical data source to recruit fall academic-intervention groups, it presents 2 limitations:

Tier 2/3 interventionists cannot begin work with students until the school has conducted the fall screening and identified groups, resulting in several weeks of dead-time when at-risk learners are not receiving intervention services.
In an effort to speed formation of fall intervention groups, the school may be tempted to screen immediately after the start of school. However, students often experience a ‘summer slide’ — a predictable and temporary drop in reading or math skills over the summer. For most students, the summer-slide effect disappears after 4-5 weeks of school. Therefore, districts that screen early — e.g. within the first 2-3 weeks of school — are likely to, ‘lock in’ temporary academic deficits and falsely identify at least some students for Tier 2/3 services whose skills would have rebounded on their own.

6. Update Your RTI/MTSS Roll-Out Plan

It can take 3 to 5 years for a school to fully implement the RTI/MTSS academic model. Buildings in the midst of rolling out RTI/MTSS will find the final months of the current school year offer a good vantage point from which to firm up plans for the next phase of implementation slated to start in the fall.

While advanced RTI/MTSS planning is always a good idea, some elements of RTI/MTSS require it.

Example:
Schools seeking to overhaul their system of Tier 2 (supplemental/small-group) interventions, may need to alter multiple elements: e.g. changing the schedule for those services, training Tier 2 providers to deliver new research-based intervention programs, revising academic-screener cut-points used to identify Tier 2-eligible students. Because each change will impact multiple staff, all changes need to be considered, finalized and communicated with relevant staff members well before actual implementation.

7. Prepare RTI/MTSS Professional Development

While schools often do a good job of planning and implementing a comprehensive RTI/MTSS plan, they sometimes overlook the need to provide ongoing professional development to prepare their staff to understand, accept, and work effectively within the plan.

As the school reflects at the close of the school year on the quality of its RTI/MTSS implementation and proposed next steps, the building should also consider what additional training teachers and support staff require to improve delivery of RTI/MTSS services. This professional-development plan should include both the essential RTI/MTSS content to be delivered to teachers and a training calendar extending into the coming school year with opportunities in large- and small-group settings.

Example:
A middle school might realize in the final months of school that their teachers are confused about how students access the various RTI/MTSS tiers of academic intervention. In response, the school creates a simple flowchart defining the RTI/MTSS components, describing how students gain access to each Tier of support, and outlining the responsibilities of each staff member to provide RTI/MTSS services. The school also develops a professional-development plan to present the flowchart, deciding to first share it at an early-fall faculty meeting and then follow up a month later with small-group discussions with instructional teams at each grade level.

“Use RTI/MTSS learnings from this year to structure a training calendar for next year, so staff will have access to opportunities to brush up on essential RTI/MTSS content.”

Concluding Thoughts

A key component of success in implementing an RTI/MTSS model is simply that schools pay attention to the details — verifying that RTI/MTSS records are complete and archived; closing gaps between current and best RTI/MTSS practices; looking forward to the next steps in the unfolding RTI/MTSS roll-out plan. The end of the school year is a strategic time for schools to focus their attention — make productive use of this pivotal moment between the recently elapsed and coming school years!

“Verify that RTI/MTSS records are complete and archived. Close gaps between current and best RTI/MTSS practices. Look forward to the next steps in the unfolding RTI/MTSS roll-out plan.”

Want to get a print-friendly version? Get the eBook here.

Talk Data to Me: The State of the Instructional Teacher Shortage

The Frontline Research and Learning Institute recently published a research brief called “The State of the Instructional Teacher Shortage”.

Following a basic supply and demand economic model, the analysis investigates the quantity of candidates applying for jobs (supply) as well as the availability of open positions (demand). Trends show changes to both sides of the equation over the past few years that are contributing to a labor shortage, however the decline in candidates is more pronounced than the increase in available jobs.

In this post, we’ll dive into updated numbers surrounding the teacher shortage as well as various strategies and tools districts can implement to quickly fill open positions.

The Teacher Shortage

The Frontline Research and Learning Institute recently published a research brief called “The State of the Instructional Teacher Shortage”. Following a basic supply and demand economic model, the analysis investigates the quantity of candidates applying for jobs (supply) as well as the availability of open positions (demand). Trends show changes to both sides of the equation over the past few years that are contributing to a labor shortage, however the decline in candidates is more pronounced than the increase in available jobs.

The supply side
The quantity of candidates applying to jobs and is measured as the average number of applications per teacher job posting.
The demand side
The availability of open job postings and is measured as the average number of teacher job postings per district.

What is the state of the teacher shortage?

With a nationally representative data set of over 1,400 school districts from January 2019 to July 2022, the Frontline Research and Learning Institute reported that supply, rather than demand, is the primary contributor to the national teacher shortage.

In this post, we’ll go over the updated supply and demand metrics from a similar nationally representative sample of over 1000 school districts nationwide.

Check out the video now for the most recent numbers

What do the most recent numbers say?

The demand side

Below is a chart of the average number of new job postings per district each month over the past four years. It’s interesting to note that this metric hardly deviates from itself year over year (aside from a slight bump in the first half of 2022).

What does this mean? Districts that are hiring are seeking to fill approximately the same number of jobs than they typically do.

Chart 1

The supply side

Chart 2 shows the average number of applicants per job posting each month over the past four years. As you can see, this metric has decreased dramatically and steadily year over year.

Postings that went live in the last quarter of 2022 are seeing about 50% less applicants than postings that went live in the last quarter of 2019.

Chart 2

The main takeaway

Trends show changes to both sides of the equation over the past few years that are contributing to a labor shortage, however the decline in candidates is more pronounced than the increase in available jobs.

The conclusion the resulting shortage is primarily a result of fewer individuals looking to fill positions.

Your action items

It’s clear that many of today’s K-12 district leaders are finding themselves struggling to recruit and hire enough qualified teachers to meet school demands and serve students.

But you can take a deep breath… because there’s good news!

Up-to-date, data driven insights paired with the latest innovations in EdTech will prepare school leaders with the information and systems they need to attract and retain quality instructional staff to their district.

Check out these top tools designed specifically for K-12:

1. Human Capital Analytics

Get an advantage with data around open positions, applications received, and recruitment efforts and results.

Frontline Human Capital Analytics provides direct access and guided analysis so district administrators can easily explore interactive dashboards, quickly view key metrics, and arrive at data-backed insights to make stronger decisions for their organization.

With your Recruiting & Hiring data, you can:

Analyze open positions to identify patterns or areas of need
Explore trends in the applicants in your district attracts, and how they align with your DEI&B initiatives
Anticipate teacher and support staff shortages and communicate your district’s staffing story to key stake

Note: Human Capital Analytics can also help your district understand staff absences and help to refine and inform your professional development program!

Make more informed human capital decisions with data

2. K12JobSpot

Find top educators around the country.

With K12JobSpot, the top job board for K-12 job-seekers, over 1,000,000 teaching jobs have been filled (and growing)!

With your Recruiting & Hiring data, you can:

Advertise open positions more widely by easily sharing jobs on your district website, social media pages and more
Proactively reach out to qualified candidates with customized, automated recruitment campaigns
Search for candidates where you are or reach out to educators across the country who have shown an interest in relocating

Find top educators across the country

3. Recruiting & Hiring + interviewstream

Enhance the hiring experience and screen candidates faster

With this official partnership, you can proactively engage with jobseekers through on-demand virtual interviews.

Give candidates flexibility and control with virtual, interactive interviews on demand
Empower HR to automate interview scheduling, rewatch live interviews to rate candidates, and score interviews in real time
Get time back from scheduling interviews, handling manual candidate information, and rallying your HR team together to perform assessments

Maximize HR’s schedule

Ready to dodge the teacher shortage and get the right people working in your schools?
Check out these resources to get started:

Recruiting the 21st Century Teacher:
Get the rundown of how K-12 HR departments can position themselves for success by diversifying their recruiting efforts.
3 Ways Technology Can Help Overcome the Teacher Shortage:
Facing a smaller pool of teacher candidates? Check out these top 3 ways technology can help your district overcome challenges associated with the teacher shortage.
Grow Your Own Teacher Programs:
GYO programs develop and train future educators from within a school district’s very own classrooms by offering alternative pathways to teacher certification. The exact objective of GYO may vary per state, but these three goals remain consistent: combatting the teacher shortage, expanding the tightening pipeline of new teachers, and diversifying the pool of teacher candidates.
The Guide to Retention-focused Recruitment:
Focusing on retention can help alleviate some of the struggles school districts have recently faced, like dwindling applicant pools and vacant positions that need to be quickly filled with highly qualified 21st century educators. Get this guide for the 4 steps you need for a retention-focused recruiting strategy.

10 Common Myths about School-based Medicaid for School Business Officials

As a school business official, you’re likely always looking for ways to maximize your school’s resources and ensure that all students receive the services they need — to do more with less.

When it comes to Medicaid claiming, there are many myths and misconceptions that can hinder your efforts to do just that. Read on for 10 common myths about Medicaid claiming plus the facts you need in order to make more informed decisions.

Myth 1: You have to be an expert in Medicaid to run a Medicaid program

Fact: No, but you do need a strong partnership between Accounting, Special Education, and a reliable vendor.

One of the key components of a successful Medicaid program is trust between all parties involved. By partnering with a vendor who has expertise in Medicaid, you can have 100% visibility into your program and have access to the data and reports you need to monitor your program.

Myth 2: Districts can only bill for services like speech and occupational therapy

Fact: Many services are reimbursable, including those provided by school nurses.
It’s important to partner with a vendor who understands the nuances of each state’s rules and regulations to ensure that you are billing for all eligible services, and staying compliant in the process. This is where the partnership between business, special education, and the vendor becomes especially critical.

Myth 3: Audit and cost reporting findings are inevitable

Fact: Although it may seem this way, there are steps you can take to prepare for your audits and cost reporting.
By working with a vendor who provides a comprehensive solution, you can gain greater control over your program and minimize the risk of negative findings.

Myth 4: Medicaid has been around forever and not much is changing

Fact: Okay, for some of you, this may seem obvious that Medicaid regulations are always changing. But for others, it may feel like once you’ve gotten the hang of things, the regulations become second nature.

Yet many states continue to explore Medicaid expansion, and the program remains flexible, allowing states to design their own programs and deliver health care services as they see fit.
By partnering with a vendor who stays up-to-date on changes and updates to the program, you can ensure that your school remains compliant and in compliance with regulations.

Myth 5: Medicaid caps mean that student care should be reserved for doctors and hospitals

Fact: Schools are now on the front lines of providing healthcare services to students in need.

By partnering with a vendor who provides comprehensive support, including a robust documentation program, you can ensure that your school is equipped to provide the best possible care for students.

Myth 6: Medicaid vendors only support interim claiming

Fact: A comprehensive vendor will provide full-service support, including a dedicated Medicaid Services Support Team and a comprehensive documentation program that enables progress monitoring and streamlines the process of documenting services.

This not only makes it easier to track services, but also helps ensure compliance and supports accurate cost reporting.

Myth 7: Districts have to file their own state Medicaid reports (for example: SHARS in Texas)

Fact: With the right solution in place, you can validate IEP services, parental consent, and more, ensuring audit-proof compliance and minimizing the risk of negative findings.

A comprehensive solution also provides a dedicated Medicaid account manager to help you navigate the process and ensure compliance. Medicaid isn’t something you should have to do alone; your vendor should be there to help!

Myth 8: The special education department doesn’t benefit from claiming for Medicaid

Fact: There are no restrictions on how the funds generated through Medicaid reimbursement can be allocated, and the special education department can certainly benefit from the additional resources.

It’s important to work with a vendor who can help you understand the full benefits of the program and ensure that all parties are comfortable with the arrangement.

Myth 9: You should only use your Medicaid software to capture and document services for Medicaid eligible students

Fact: You should capture services for all students, regardless of their eligibility status, for compliance and to ensure that your program stays up to date with ever-changing eligibility requirements.

One of the biggest challenges schools face when it comes to Medicaid is two-fold: ensuring that they are capturing all of the services they need to while ensuring that all documentation of those services is conducted correctly.

Myth 10: Medicaid is reactive in nature

Fact: Medicaid can be proactive in nature with the right collaboration.
One of the keys to maximizing your school’s Medicaid reimbursement is having a strong partnership in place with your vendor. A comprehensive, full-service vendor that provides support for Medicaid services can be your best asset when it comes to staying ahead of the game. With their expertise in the program, your vendor can provide you with the security you need in forecasting revenue, as well as expected reimbursement.

By debunking these myths and understanding the facts, you can be confident in your ability to run a successful Medicaid program for your school. By establishing a strong partnership with a vendor that provides comprehensive support, you can take a proactive approach to maximizing your school’s Medicaid reimbursement.

Frontline can help you with Medicaid audit protection, service scheduling, and so much more. See the system in action now.

5 Tips for Looking Ahead to Next Year’s Professional Development Program

At various times throughout the year, it’s helpful to reflect as central office professional learning leaders and in teams with your coaches, specialists, principals and teacher leaders. Why? Building on collective wisdom to engage in informed planning will give you a leg up for next year’s PD!

Reflection & Generation plays a vital role in ensuring sticky adult learning. You infuse your professional learning experiences with opportunities to think-pair-share, surface assumptions, SWOT and so on. You generate insights, plans and actions as individuals, pairs and teams and across our campuses.

What does that look like? Well, it’s more than just perceptions of what worked well and what didn’t. It’s about the questions that you ask about the data we have and how you can move professional learning outcomes into classroom practice.

With that context, here are 5 tips to reevaluate your PD program and questions you can ask for each one:

1. Analyze data to evaluate PD effectiveness throughout the year

Consider the evidence that you’ll want to have at this time next year and formulate your questions now.

Example:

How do we know that professional learning impacted instructional practice and student learning?
Which professional learning formats were most effective in advancing educator growth?
Do we know if the expense for the kick-off guest speaker in September had greater impact than the weekly coaching activities?
The ability to answer these questions is becoming increasingly vital with reduced resources and increased expectations around accountability.

2. Determine whether or not your efforts were aligned and coherent

Thinking about next year, consider which aspects of your professional learning system don’t align with your goals or are inconsistent with your aspirations for the culture of professional learning in your organization. Laser focus on those. 

Example:

In what ways did our professional learning initiatives and job-embedded structures align with district, building, and personal goals this past year?
To what extent was professional learning a meaningful and integrated component of the performance evaluation process, supporting focused ongoing learning and growth

3. Examine your job-embedded learning structures and support

Reflecting on the progress within job-embedded settings, examine the degree to which new learning was applied in practice. For next year, consider ways to tightly link job-embedded learning to student learning needs by employing backwards planning as teams start the year.  

Example:

Were our pairs and teams empowered and informed enough to take collective responsibility for their learning? How do we know?
Did the tracking methods used by learning teams, coaches and mentors give them the information they needed to implement cycles of continuous improvement?

4. Consider how you utilized technology tools to extend, enhance, and document

Think about any additional data points that you’ll want to capture over the coming year to evaluate effectiveness. Consider how you can refine your technology systems to track for compliance, implementation, and impact.  

Example:

To what extent was online or blended learning a part of professional learning in our system over the past year?

5. Benchmark your professional learning program to the prior year

Seek out the pioneers among your faculty. Set up a shared document for people to capture their reflections on innovation throughout the year. Which paraprofessional attended an EdCamp? Which principal is using Twitter as a professional learning tool? Collect their stories as a jumping off point for innovation for next year.  

Example:

Are we dropping what is not effective to embrace promising new ideas?
What risks did we take in our thinking and implementation of professional learning, and what did we learn?

Learn more about implementing a comprehensive, individualized professional development program

Recommended Resources:

Effective Professional Learning Strategies (That Actually Work): The national landscape of professional development in K-12, best practices for an effective professional development program, resources for getting started, and more.
[Webinar] Professional Growth Retains Educators: Learn how to deploy a year-round PG and retention plan to address every educator’s unique needs.
[Playbook] Designing High-Quality Professional Development Programs: A play-by-play of what high-quality professional learning looks like, and how to plan and implement it at your district.

Providing Structure to an Unstructured Data Environment

Big data is nothing new in education. Districts grapple with disparate datasets living in various places both at the district office and within each individual school, all with the objective of making sense of so many data elements. From state data sources to vendor data extracts to local data sets, collecting and organizing the vast amount of student information can be overwhelming for any district.

While districts are consistently looking for critical insights on student performance from all these different sources of data, it can become extremely difficult to translate what is meaningful and what is not, unless there is a plan. In working with districts across the country, many are tackling data governance through a few simple strategies.

Strategy #1 – Aligning data to strategic goals

First, as a district, consider making critical decisions around what data sources are most important to measure district goals. Use your district’s strategic plan as a blueprint for your data collection, and if the data source does not align with that strategic plan, it may be taking up a lot of district resources to maintain datasets that are not used by your staff or aligned to current district goals. Additionally, when data is presented that is not aligned with the goals of the district, confusion may arise to what the areas of focus are within the organization. Keep it simple…In order for a dataset to be maintained, it has to align to a district goal.

Strategy #2 – Identifying your data champions

Second, with the increase in data requirements from state and federal levels, keeping good records on students becomes critical, especially when funding aligns to student enrollment, demographics, and performance. More and more, districts are identifying key personnel as ‘data champions’ to ensure there is proper, safe, and consistent data entry and management practices across all schools within the district.

Point of entry is critical to ensure the data is accurate, especially within systems like the student information system (SIS), as many critical data exports come from the SIS and are shared with vendors, state/federal governing bodies and even stakeholders. Equally important is managing access to the data to ensure all individuals that have access to district data are in compliance with all state and federal data privacy guidelines/regulations.

Strategy #3 – Visualizing your data

Once you know your critical datasets and you know it is entered properly to align to your goals, visualize the data. Providing analytics, specifically, disaggregated analytics, provides leadership teams the ability to determine if the organization is staying on-track with their goals, or if they need to pivot and change course. Furthermore, these analytics can be great tools to communicate to your respective stakeholders on how the district and schools are keeping a laser-like focus on the goals established by the organization.

All in all, while the data landscape is ever changing, data governance is critical to making sure that each district accesses, collects, manages, and analyzes data that aligns to strategic goals. This endeavor is no easy task, as it must comply with all data privacy legislation. However, by focusing on key data elements, empowering key personnel to ‘own’ the data and presenting it in a manner that accurately portrays the performance of the school district, allows leaders to effectively communicate the goals of the organization and how they are moving toward achieving those goals each day.

Want to learn how Frontline can help you make sense of your data? Learn more here

5 Questions to Ask for Effective Professional Development

Ineffective vs Effective Professional Development With ESSA

Historically, professional learning has tended toward the ineffective end of the PD continuum: teachers attend a workshop, lecture or meeting, passively listen and check it off the list of things that must be done. Once it’s over, they may never think about it again. On the other end of the continuum is a more dynamic professional learning experience, in which teachers are engaged in learning that will immediately and lastingly affect their pedagogical practice and enable them to reach students effectively. The question is, how does the move from one end of the continuum to the other happen?

As you think about the professional learning program in your school system, here are five essential questions to ask — and a look at how ESSA influences each.

1. What data analysis would allow evaluation of how effective professional learning efforts have been over the past year?

ESSA states that professional learning must be data-driven and targeted to specific educator needs. But beyond that, it must also be regularly evaluated to determine whether or not it produces changes in practice. This is a broader conception of what it means to be “evidence-based.” Gone are the NCLB days of strict “scientifically-based research.” The current focus is on making sure that professional learning makes a difference in the classroom. The evidence can be very local — what’s proving effective in this classroom, school or district?

With that backdrop, building leaders must decide how they will collect the kind of evidence they need to provide meaningful feedback to teachers.

2. To what degree were professional learning efforts aligned and coherent?

ESSA calls for PD that is part of broader school improvement plans — a systems approach that highlights the interactive nature of recruitment, educator development, retention, ongoing learning and growth and advancement. The goal is to build a unified approach for supporting excellent educators throughout the cycle of their careers.
It’s important to develop a strategic professional learning system that helps district offices collaborate and share data to make decisions. This includes strengthening the connections between district, building and individual teacher goals to create alignment, so that coherence can flourish.

Hand-picked content:

How to Gauge the Impact of Your Professional Learning Program Read The Blog

3. Did job-embedded learning structures have the support needed to function effectively last year?

ESSA allows ample opportunity for educators to create their own learning paths. This stretches them well beyond simply tracking completion, hours and credits. Effective professional learning is about individuals, pairs and learning teams defining and working toward their learning goals — based, of course, on student needs from day to day, week to week and month to month. It’s recognizing that most of the answers are within the building today — within coaching pairs and PLCs and in collaboration between educators, to name a few. System leaders need to create settings for educators to access and apply those profoundly relevant insights and integrate a variety of supplemental just-in-time content and other resources as needed.

4. Were technology tools effectively used to extend, enhance and document evidence of the effectiveness of professional learning?

When it comes to professional learning, ESSA emphasizes transparency. This often requires districts to evaluate their professional learning technology solutions. Do these solutions make it easy to collect and report on multiple data points, including teacher qualifications, how professional learning is applied and the impact it has on teaching? If all educators and leaders can access this data, they’ll be better able to collaborate, and together can take responsibility for planning, monitoring implementation and reviewing outcomes.

Hand-picked content:

Effective Professional Learning Strategies (That Actually Work) Learn More

5. What has innovation in professional learning looked like during the last year?

The notion of flexibility is woven throughout ESSA, which opens the door to great possibility!

Giving all educators a voice in their professional learning — including in areas like goal-setting and by using individual learning plans — can play a vital role in this. Flexible mechanisms for state reporting are also helpful.

One key question to ponder: “As we engage our teachers, giving them greater choice and possibilities for innovation, what processes and tools do we have in place?”

Protecting Medicaid Coverage for Millions of Students: How School Medicaid Directors Can Help

School Medicaid directors have an important role to play in supporting families to maintain their Medicaid coverage. There is a significant change happening in healthcare coverage that will affect millions of students across the country who rely on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for their health insurance.

There is a significant change happening in healthcare coverage that will affect millions of students across the country who rely on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for their health insurance. #Medicaid #StudentHealth

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Since the start of the Public Health Emergency in March 2020, families enrolled in Medicaid have not been required to complete renewal paperwork to stay covered. However, starting on April 1, 2023, this continuous coverage protection will lift, and states will resume reviewing eligibility for all people enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP to ensure they still qualify. During this process, known as the “unwinding,” it is estimated that 6.7 million children will lose their Medicaid coverage, despite the majority of them continuing to be eligible for either Medicaid or CHIP.

During the “unwinding,” it is estimated that 6.7 million children will lose their Medicaid coverage, despite the majority of them continuing to be eligible for either Medicaid or CHIP. #medicaid #StudentHealth

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Related Resource:

As student eligibly changes, districts need to seek parental consent for Medicaid. Learn more about the requirements and regulations around parental consent as well as best practices Blog: Navigating Parental Consent for Medicaid

Your Action Plan: Supporting Families through Unwinding in Two Easy Steps

STEP 1

To reduce the loss of health coverage, it is crucial that parents act quickly to confirm or update their contact information with the State Medicaid agency and provide the necessary information to complete their Medicaid renewal when notified. Families could receive renewal paperwork at any point this year or early next year.

Schools and district administrators can play a critical role in protecting children’s health coverage by ensuring families are aware of these Medicaid changes.
The first step for families is to ensure that their state Medicaid agency has the correct contact information for every member of their family on Medicaid, so they receive their renewal notices when the time comes. If families do not receive the notice, they may not realize their child has been disenrolled from coverage and is uninsured until it is too late.

STEP 2

The second step is for families to quickly fill out the paperwork and return it should they get a notification.

If something goes wrong, and their child loses coverage, parents need to quickly reach out to a navigator or enrollment assistor to see if they can re-enroll in Medicaid or to check if they qualify for subsidized coverage through the ACA Marketplace.

So, What Comes Next?

If you are a school Medicaid director looking for resources to support families in maintaining their Medicaid coverage, then the “Unwinding Comms Toolkit” is an excellent resource for you.

This toolkit, available for download on the Medicaid website, includes a range of communication materials such as backpack fliers, newsletter blurbs, robocall scripts, and social media posts that you can use to inform families about the upcoming changes to Medicaid coverage.

With the help of this toolkit, you can ensure that families in your district are aware of the renewal process and have the necessary information to complete their renewals on time, thus reducing the risk of losing their Medicaid coverage.

The unwinding of the Medicaid “continuous coverage” policy will be an unprecedented undertaking for the State Medicaid agency and families to ensure that children stay connected with their health coverage.
Schools are a central access point for students to be connected to necessary health services, and it is critical to keep children connected to health coverage to receive necessary care.

“Schools are a central access point for students to be connected to necessary health services, and it is critical to keep children connected to health coverage to receive necessary care.”

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Keeping students connected to Medicaid is also important for the fiscal health of all districts.

Almost all schools depend on Medicaid to help cover the cost of certain special education services. The potential impact will be even greater if your district is in one of the 17 states that have expanded Medicaid reimbursement to cover school health services for all Medicaid-enrolled students.

Front & Center: Lourie Larcade

Lourie Larcade is a Business Services Specialist with the Tehama County Department of Education in northern California. With 10 years of experience in school business and still more experience before that in the private sector, we’re thrilled to highlight Lourie in this edition of “Front & Center”.

Tell us about yourself!

I have been married to my husband Jay for 28 years and between us we have 4 daughters: Lisa, a grocery store manager; Megan, a grocery store supervisor; Tara, Administrative Assistant at the California Highway Patrol; and Kalee, a restaurant area manager. They are all successful, wonderful women and between them we have 7 wonderful grandchildren. My husband and I love to travel with my sister and her husband, and we all love to cruise and love the beach. The Caribbean Islands are our favorite places to travel.

I love to go for long bike rides, run, and kayak. Spending time with my children and grandchildren always makes me happy. We would love to live on an island in the Caribbean if we could!

What was your first job in education? Tell us your journey to get to your current role.

In 2010, I was in the public sector doing payroll at the company that I had worked at for 24 years. This company was dissolving, and I was one of 2 employees on the last day, handling everything with the bank, accountants, and attorneys to close the doors.

My first job in education was as an Accounting Technician here at the Tehama COE. I was only in that job for 3 weeks when I was offered the opportunity to apply for a Payroll Specialist position, processing the payroll for the county office as well as overseeing the 17 district payrolls.

Just over 5 years ago I applied for my current position, which involves being the Business Manager for the two county-authorized Charter Schools, calculating and reporting the attendance for the entire county, and being the Frontline ERP Software Support Specialist. My plate is very full, but I enjoy my job very much.

If you could give any advice to yourself at the beginning of your career, what would it be?

Give yourself time to learn. Moving from the private sector to education is a big move and requires a lot of time to learn the processes, terminology, and legalities of working with public funds. Know that you are capable of doing a good job!

What is one skill everyone who works in school business should have?

It is very important to be able to think outside of the box and to know that everything we do touches so much more. You need the ability and skill to be very detailed oriented and organized.

What is the best creative idea you have had that has made a difference in your role?

Putting myself in the position of learning parts of this organization that do not fall into my job description. Knowing a little about the education side of the house makes it easier to understand what they need as far as budgeting goes.

What will change most in education over the next 10 years?

I think it will be the way we are funded. I believe we will move away from the Local Control Funding Formula to more restricted funding. I don’t necessarily agree this is best, but it seems to be the way we are going. I believe local control of our funds to be able to use them as we see fit will best benefit our students. I also think that the number of people working remotely as well as the number of students who are virtual could grow.

What are you most hopeful about for the future of education?

I am hopeful that we are teaching our children not only math, reading, and science but that we teach them how to be productive adults by teaching them everyday life skills.

How does Lourie and the Tehama County Department of Education use Frontline ERP?
Read the case study

3 Ways Technology Can Help Overcome the Teacher Shortage

Is your district facing a smaller pool of teacher candidates or high turnover rates? If so, do you have insight into how technology can help you attract and retain quality educators to quickly fill open positions?

In a recent webinar, Frontline Education and interviewstream joined K-12 HR leaders to discuss modern recruiting technology, as well as how utilizing this technology can help school districts overcome the teacher shortage.

The speakers

Before we discuss the whats, hows, and whys, it’s probably helpful to know who is behind this webinar! Here is the panel of industry experts and K-12 leaders:

Mitchell Welch
Principal Solutions Consultant, Frontline Education
Joey Vasser
Partner Success Manager, interviewstream
Dana Morrison
Recruitment/Talent Manager, East Baton Rouge Parish School System
Julie Tobin
Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources at Community Consolidated School District

The current challenges in K-12 hiring

The teacher shortage is widespread, and many school districts are struggling to find and hire qualified educators. Although not every district experiences the shortage the same, and some may have shortages only for specific positions, the added stresses are likely consistent. Here are the areas of need discussed throughout the webinar:

“We’ve continued to expand our dual and bilingual programs into our elementary and middle schools. So, we’re finding, as many districts around us, that our shortages are the highest with bilingual educators. Special education is also an area of great need, self-contained special education teachers in particular.”

Julie Tobin

“In East Baton Rouge Parish, we have 80 schools in our school system, and we have needs in every area. One of the trends we’ve seen is a great number of educators retire, and we definitely have a need for bilingual educators as well. One vacancy is too many.”

Dana Morrison

When it comes to the #TeacherShortage, a single vacancy can feel like one too many.

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What does the data say behind these trends in these respective districts? Are other districts experiencing similar shortage areas? The Frontline Research & Learning Institute (FRLI) found in a recent survey that half of respondents reported difficulty filling jobs across all grade levels and subjects while the other half felt the effects of the shortage in specific subject areas only. Here were some of the findings:

The hardest subjects to fill according to a recent FRLI survey:

Lead teachers and department heads took the longest to fill
Mathematics, science, and special education took longer to fill than the average job posting
Business Education and Foreign Language teachers had the lowest hire rate

What areas or subjects is your district experiencing the heaviest shortage? Share below!

Your action items: utilizing technology to combat the teacher shortage

There are so many ways technology can help position your district for success. Here are the top 3 ways technology can help your district overcome challenges associated with the teacher shortage.

Internal and external technology

When it comes to using technology in K-12 HR, it can be easy to get stuck in the way of how you’ve always done things. For example, maybe your district only uses video tech externally for things like interviews and recruiting (and it probably works wonders). But with that exact same tech, you can expand your use into other internal areas and reap even more benefits!

According to Mitchell, to optimize your efforts to combat the teacher shortage, it’s important to “expand your reach beyond using technology just to bring people in”. Of course, utilizing tech for recruiting is critical to attracting quality candidates, but districts should think about ways tech can be implemented after the candidate becomes a new hire. Here are some of his ideas for internal tech as outlined in the webinar:
- Job-embedded training for substitutes
- Mentor & mentee engagement sessions
- Professional development videos
- Instructional content for paraprofessionals
- Specified talent engagement
“In East Baton Rouge Parish, we wanted to use video technology for more than just interviews. So, we’ve used this technology to open up new areas internally: literacy coaches, math coaches, and social-emotional learning specialists. We also use video technology for equity so that everyone has an opportunity, and everyone has the chance to share or respond.”

Dana Morrison

Handpicked content you may enjoy:

See how one school district took their onboarding process from three hours to fifteen minutes with this technology

Technology for retention

More than half of teachers leave the profession in their first five years. Once you’ve recruited the best, what can you do to retain talent to avoid this statistic? Making sure your teachers are engaged and continually growing in practice is a good first step. Mitchell says one of the easiest ways to do this is by “leveraging technology for retention”.

In the webinar, the panelists discuss retention and technology with the idea of conducting ‘stay interviews’ during the school year to identify what is going well in their teachers’ eyes as well as areas for improvement. Afterall, when teachers feel respected, taken care of, and have the support of leadership, they are far more likely stay!

Questions to consider for stay interviews:
- In what ways do you or don’t you feel supported in your professional growth?
- If you had a magic wand, what would be the one thing you would change about your work, role, or responsibilities?
- What types of recognitions and acknowledgement increase your loyalty and commitment to the district?
“Our [new hires] want support, mentoring, and continuous growth.”

Julie Tobin

Handpicked content you may enjoy:

Need ideas to keep great educators in your district? Check out these 5 strategies for increasing teacher retention rates

Technology for district brand

When you invest in your district’s brand, everyone benefits. It becomes easier to attract more talented teachers, improve community engagement and maintain an excellent reputation. Mitchell describes the importance of taking time to reflect on questions like: How do candidates see you? What brings a candidate to your district? How did you infuse your brand in the process that candidates go through?

Ideas for showcasing your brand with technology:
- Create personalized welcome videos for new hires
- Announce your teacher of the year with a spotlight segment
- Improve parental engagement with videos that highlight your mission, vision, and values
“People are very visual. They like seeing or hearing (audio or video). You can include teacher leaders, teachers of the year, students, or make short introductions. Anytime you can add a storyline to your system, it’s very powerful.”

Dana Morrison

Handpicked content you may enjoy:

How to Build Your District Brand

A better way

Though making a change to the way you use technology can feel daunting, the right tools can help. Strengthen your recruiting process and combat the teacher shortage with Frontline Education and interviewstream. This official partnership equips K-12 organizations with the right technology, data, and insights to find the best candidates quickly, increase retention rates, and help build your district’s brand.

Promote educator growth and market your district brand by leveraging video technology internally and externally
Improve the candidate experience with virtual, interactive interviews on demand (which they can watch back and even rerecord!)
Maximize your schedule and get time back from scheduling interviews, handling manual candidate information, and rallying your HR team together to perform assessments

Ready to implement this technology in your district and quickly fill open positions?
Learn more

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MEET FRONTLINE

1. “The question that always comes up in our district is diagnosis. We have a student who cannot concentrate, gets in trouble due to socialization in class but we don’t have a diagnosis. Can we say that it appears that the student has ADHD?”

2. “What about a medical disability? Anxiety? Can a team determine this disability through data?”

3. “If ADHD doesn’t need a medical source to be used to establish the eligibility for 504 Plan, how is this not a suspected disability?”

4. “Schools are not supposed to diagnose, so how do you document the disability if there is not an ADHD diagnosis. Can the school record ‘data shows significant attention concerns’? How is this different than disability vs. difficulty?”

5. “If a student is unable to pass any of the 5 end-of-course assessments (EOCs), is that a good reason to refer for an full individual evaluation to Special Education?”

6. “I was told counselor cannot be written in the 504 Plan because all students have access to the counselor. Is that true?”

8. “Would toy guns fall under weapon exclusion?”

9. “For manifestation determination review (MDR) when you speak of Procedural Safeguards provided to the parent, are you referring to Procedural Safeguards explaining rights under IDEA or does 504 have Procedural Safeguards?”

10. “If we do yearly meetings and go over the plan with the parents and teachers, do we still need to do an evaluation every three years?”

11. “Can students with Section 504 Plans be placed in special education classes (ie. study skills in high school taught by a special education teacher)?”

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Pleasant Grove ISD at a Glance:

KPIs to Track

Student Enrollment

Student-to-Teacher Ratio

Administrative Cost Ratio

Fund Balance to Expenditure/Revenue Ratio

Days of Cash on Hand

Expenditure-to-Revenue Ratio

Surplus/Deficit-to-Revenue/Expense Ratio

Debt Burden Ratio

How to Track Data Over Time

Board Communication

Advice for Tracking KPIs

Best Practices for Closing Out This Year & Preparing for Next Year

1. Archive Your RTI/MTSS Information

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2. Evaluate Effectiveness of Core Instruction

3. Analyze RTI/MTSS Data to Uncover Performance ‘Pockets’

“Advanced RTI/MTSS ‘data mining’ requires a school or district first standardize its procedures.”

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4. ‘Recalibrate’ Your RTI/MTSS Procedures

5. Recruit Fall Groups Using End-of-Year Screeners

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6. Update Your RTI/MTSS Roll-Out Plan

7. Prepare RTI/MTSS Professional Development

“Use RTI/MTSS learnings from this year to structure a training calendar for next year, so staff will have access to opportunities to brush up on essential RTI/MTSS content.”

Concluding Thoughts

“Verify that RTI/MTSS records are complete and archived. Close gaps between current and best RTI/MTSS practices. Look forward to the next steps in the unfolding RTI/MTSS roll-out plan.”

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Myth 1: You have to be an expert in Medicaid to run a Medicaid program

Myth 2: Districts can only bill for services like speech and occupational therapy

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Myth 3: Audit and cost reporting findings are inevitable

Myth 4: Medicaid has been around forever and not much is changing

Myth 5: Medicaid caps mean that student care should be reserved for doctors and hospitals

Myth 6: Medicaid vendors only support interim claiming

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Myth 7: Districts have to file their own state Medicaid reports (for example: SHARS in Texas)

Myth 8: The special education department doesn’t benefit from claiming for Medicaid

Myth 9: You should only use your Medicaid software to capture and document services for Medicaid eligible students

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Myth 10: Medicaid is reactive in nature

1. Analyze data to evaluate PD effectiveness throughout the year

Example: