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Employee Onboarding: Improve First Impressions & Lasting Retention | Part Three

A recent study shows nearly 70% of your teachers are not engaged in their jobs. That’s troubling news for American education.

Many district administrators balk at a statistic that drastic, believing it cannot be true of their district. But according to a recent Gallup survey of 7,200 teachers, 31% of teachers are engaged, 56% are not engaged (although satisfied), and 13% are actively disengaged.

Gallup defines these terms as follows:

Engaged: “Involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work . . . knowing the scope of their jobs and constantly looking for new and better ways to achieve outcomes”

Not Engaged: “May be satisfied with their jobs, but they are not emotionally connected to their workplace and unlikely to devote much discretionary effort to their work”

Actively Disengaged: “Dissatisfied with their workplace and likely to be spreading negativity to their coworkers”

Naturally, any organization would want its employees to be engaged with their daily job and company culture. The benefits or the costs of engaged or disengaged employees are obvious. However, the burden of K-12 school districts to engage its employees is far greater than increasing a profit line.

Any district employee – especially a teacher – who is “enthusiastic about, and committed to their work” is significantly more likely to make a positive impact on a student’s growth. We need our students to be surrounded by a faculty and staff who are “looking for new and better ways to achieve outcomes.”

Yet according to Gallup’s sampling results, less than a third of K-12 teachers in the U.S. are actually engaged with their roles in their districts. How can we work to correct this?

In part one and part two of this series, I defined onboarding and talked about its benefits for school districts and their new employees.

In part three, I want to help equip you to successfully improve the number of engaged employees for your district.

Fostering Engagement for Retention

The word ENGAGE is a handy mnemonic for remembering six key actions you can take to foster engagement in your district and increase employee retention – and not only with new hires.

  • Expanded recognition
  • Networking availability and encouragement
  • Generated “input for impact” dialogue
  • Access to resources
  • Giving your time
  • Evaluations made often

E. Expanded recognition

Employee recognition should be given across all levels of the district. Employees should feel welcomed as a member of the team by their peers, as valuable assets by their immediate supervisor, and as individuals by their district administration.

Establish programs for effective recognition that increase the number of persons highlighted, such as rewards or employee spotlights on district newsletters or allowing peer “high-fives” to be given via social media, as examples.

N. Networking availability and encouragement

Networking is important as a career- and relationship-building opportunity. If an employee doesn’t have the chance to build a relationship with other members of the district (on multiple different levels), then that employee probably won’t be engaged with his or her role in the district.

Here are some potential networking options:

  • Committees and task forces
  • Work team projects
  • Division or department challenges
  • Group wellness activities
  • Community service projects
  • Campus renovation days
  • Group volunteer days
  • Staff meal prep
  • Interest-based outings

G. Generated “input for impact” dialogue

Most employers collect information on why employees leave, exit interviews. Why not collect information on why employees choose to stay? Kathryn Tyler of SHRM HR Magazine writes about the value of interviewing employees who have chosen to stay at your district in her article “Who Will Stay and Who Will Go?”

Start with the top performers and influencers of your district. Find out what it is about your district that engages them. Not only will this interaction further their own engagement by asking their valued opinion, but it will help you to understand how to engage the rest of your staff as well.

This will also give you the opportunity to collect data to determine critical timeframes for engaging employees in your district, prior to when your data indicates an upswing in voluntary departures. In their survey, Gallup uncovered correlations between how experienced a teacher was and their level of engagement.

engagement by experience level chart

Insights like these can help you make informed decisions for your district.

A. Access to resources

Remember, engaged employees are “constantly looking for new and better ways to achieve outcomes.” It would be hard for an employee to innovate or improve the impact of their job if they don’t have access to valuable resources. You need to equip your district’s staff, so that they can equip your district’s students.

Here are just a few examples of resources you could provide to your employees:

Cover class or job responsibilities to observe a peer or meet to collaborate
Send to workshop, class, clinic, presentation
Nominate for a committee or team
Bring in a specialist, presenter, program
Introduce to an expert, colleague, organization
Provide web links, videos, newsletters, trainers

G. Giving your time

Your district’s administrators and supervisors need to genuinely and generously give time to their employees, especially in the onboarding period. Spend this time giving employees validation by slowing yourself down to listen to their needs and ideas and to build real relationships with them. If you meet your employees on a level of respect, first as a person and second as an employee, you’ll stand a far better chance of earning their respect and keeping them in your district.

E. Evaluations made often

Effective evaluation is like effective practice. You need to commit to regular evaluations so you can understand the status and see the growth of each employee, and they can understand your expectations.

Early in an employee’s career, frequent evaluations will help establish engagement between you and your new staff member, and it will help you track their productivity. Over time, as the employee demonstrates progress and mastery in their role, you can distribute your evaluations less frequently throughout the year, so that you can focus more time on new employees. Noticing that you are “loosening the leash” a bit by spacing out evaluations demonstrates trust, which in turn increases the employee’s motivation and engagement.

If you can form a habit of talking with your employees – not at them – early and often in their careers, and provide the necessary guidance and resources they need to grow in their role, your district will enjoy and retain a more fully engaged team.

In the fourth and final post in this series, I will talk about how you can use technology to spread out your district’s onboarding process to give more attention to specific areas that are often overlooked by the common onboarding experience: areas beyond mandatory compliance notifications and the “dos and don’ts” in procedure handbooks and policies.

Employee Onboarding: Improve First Impressions & Lasting Retention | Part Two

In the last blog post, I defined onboarding, explained why it’s important for districts to master, and offered one area where school districts can cultivate the loyalty of their new employees: pride. In part two of the series, I want to give you some practical tips for how you can approach the onboarding experience in a way that will further engage your new employees and help them to understand your expectations.

Your Objectives for Onboarding

As a school district, you have specific takeaways you want your new employees to understand after going through the onboarding process. In “Onboarding: The First Line of Engagement,” Martin and Bourke offer five benefits organizations want to achieve through onboarding:

1. Ensure new employees are engaged and assimilated into the company’s culture

2. Help your new employees become productive faster

3. Increase retention of new employees

4. Improve the experience your organization offers via more effective employees

5. Save on long-term costs

The first two are obvious and important. You need to bring your new hires into the fold of the district staff. And this isn’t just for their own sake. A Texas Instruments study showed that employees reached “full productivity” two months sooner when their onboarding process was fully attended to, as compared to those whose was not.

A lot of ground can be gained or lost in two months. After two months, nearly half of a semester is over. Employees have already established their opinions on their position within the district, and students have certainly solidified their opinions of the district’s staff. After two months of employment, the battle for an employee’s engagement has largely already been won or lost.

However, an effective onboarding process affects more than the productivity of your employees. Improving your onboarding experience also improves your district’s employee retention and long-term recruiting costs.

David Lee of HumanNature@Work cites several examples of organizations that reduced their employee turnover by improving their onboarding experience. Hunter Douglas reduced their employee turnover from 70% to 16% in just six months. Likewise, Designer Blinds reduced their annual turnover from a staggering 200% to less than 8%, which directly translated to a reduction of their recruiting budget.

However, the true cost of something isn’t always in dollars and cents. The cost of losing your best employees to voluntary attrition can also be seen in:

1. A lower morale of remaining employees
2. Questionable supervision inquiries
3. Reduced public satisfaction
4. Service or performance declines and delays
5. A change in organizational reputation

Your Employees’ Objectives for Onboarding

So how do you improve your onboarding experience? One of the biggest mistakes you can make in your employee onboarding is to take a one-sided approach to the process. Another is trying to cram too much into too little of a time frame. Two parties are involved in the onboarding process: the district and the new hires. You must take adequate time to acknowledge the needs and wants of both parties in order to have an effective process.

Often the time crunch of compacting onboarding activities into only a few hours or a couple of days causes district staff to overload and overwhelm their newest talent at a time when those recruits should be most excited and enthusiastic.

If you want to change your district’s employee engagement and retention, invert your onboarding process and focus on employees’ questions first.

Ask yourself what your individual employees want to know. Then ask yourself what the district wants its employees to know. Your employees’ questions may seem secondary compared to the high-level expectations the district needs to set, but if the employees’ questions aren’t answered, they might be too preoccupied to focus on what the district is communicating.

In “What New Employees Really Need to Know,” Lin Grensing-Pophal shares three categories of questions on new employees’ minds, as well as the order in which they should be addressed:

The Things That Affect Employees Personally

“Where should I park? What should I wear?”
“Where should I report? What are my work hours?”
“Will I be expected to work overtime? To work evenings? Weekends?”
“How does the phone system work? When will my email be active?”
“What’s my network login and password? Do I get keys?”

The Things That Affect Employees as a Member of Their Department

“Who will I be working with?”
“Who are the people I need to get to know in the department and in other departments?”
“How will my work be judged?”
“Are there opportunities to serve on special committees or task forces and how can I find out more?”
“If I have ideas, suggestions or concerns, what channels exist to share those concerns?”
“How do people prefer to communicate in this organization? (Face to face? By e-mail? Phone?)”

The Things That Affect Employees as a Member of the Organization

“What are the organization’s mission, vision and values (and how does my department fit into this)?”
“Do we have a strategic plan? What does it entail?”
“What are the major external issues that impact us?”
“What are our priorities? What are our long-range goals?”
“What are employees rewarded and recognized for?”

As Maslow from your psychology class has suggested, if you can meet the more foundational, immediate “safety-security-survival” needs of new employees, they will be in a better frame of mind to consider their place within the district at large and be more receptive and engaged for your district agendas.

Conclusion

Focusing on your employees’ needs first will guarantee that they are engaged in the onboarding process from the start. By engaging them, they’ll become better assimilated into your district staff, and therefore become productive faster. Productive employees are generally more satisfied with their roles in the district, and will likely remain at the district longer, improving district performance and saving on recruiting expenses. In part three of my onboarding series, I will give you specific tips for fostering engagement to improve employee relationships and retention.

MyLearningPlan FAQs (Now Frontline Professional Growth)

Questions about our professional learning and teacher evaluation management system formerly known as MyLearningPlan? You’ve come to the right place!

Here are a few of the most frequent questions we hear from school districts that are researching Frontline Professional Growth. Don’t see your question here? Feel free to contact us!

Why isn’t it called MyLearningPlan anymore?

MyLearningPlan, a well-known provider of educator professional growth and evaluation management tools for K-12 school districts, was acquired in May 2015 by Frontline Education.

Frontline Education is a leading provider of school administration software. MyLearningPlan is now part of Frontline Professional Growth, aligning it with the rest of the solutions Frontline Education offers.

How is Frontline Professional Growth different from MyLearningPlan OASYS or PDMS?

These applications are still a part of Frontline Professional Growth, although these days they’re known as Employee Evaluation Management and Professional Learning Management They are part of the broader Frontline Professional Growth solution, which includes tools to manage professional learning and evaluation, as well as resources for teachers to enhance their own learning and collaborate with each other online.

Why manage professional development online?

 
Frontline Professional Growth isn’t about removing the human touch from employee evaluations or professional learning. Quite the opposite, actually.  By simplifying the professional learning process, compiling forms, goals and PD resources in one place, and improving transparency throughout the whole evaluation process, Frontline Professional Growth helps district leaders cultivate consistent, substantial professional learning for all staff. Plus, by giving teachers direct access to their PD resources and evaluation data, teachers can revisit their goals regularly as they seek to grow in their careers.

What forms are included in the solution?

Frontline Professional Growth is all about flexibility. Districts can provide their current forms and rubrics, and our employee evaluation management tools allow you to configure the process to fit what you need. The management tools will allow you to oversee every component of the evaluation process, including: self-reflection and goal setting, in-class observations, student learning objectives and growth data. That means you can focus on having meaningful discussions about instructional practice with educators.

How does Frontline Professional Growth simplify how we manage forms?

By adding all your forms online within Frontline Professional Growth, the data is easily tracked by not only the end user, but by administration as well. This eliminates the need for spreadsheets to track things like licensure, salary movements, district-required hours and other requirements. Instead, the system replaces your spreadsheets with easily accessible reports, which can always be downloaded to Excel if needed.

Will the solution allow for multiple methods of scoring?

Yes! Frontline Professional Growth’s configuration process is very flexible. Districts can determine their scoring philosophy, be it a Scoring Form Approach, Holistic Approach or a hybrid of these approaches. The solution also allows districts to use conversion charts.

Will the teachers have access to their evaluation data?

Yes, teachers have direct access to their evaluation data, enabling them to regularly assess their progress.

Teachers have the ability to complete forms such as self-reflections and SLO/SGO forms. They also have the ability to upload evaluation evidence via the artifact section – an electronic portfolio for teachers.

Can districts manage SLOs in the solution?

With Frontline Professional Growth, you can host all of your Student Learning Objective data in one system, managing single or multiple SLOs for each person.

Does the system support educator growth based on evaluation results?

You can incorporate data from multiple measures, and with the full Frontline Professional Growth solution, recommend targeted professional learning based on evaluation results. This is known as the Learning Loop, and provides professional learning recommendations through the correlation of individual evaluation outcomes to state-standard-aligned PD opportunities.

Can the system help us with collaborative professional learning?

Yes! Our professional learning management system helps create and manage any type of collaborative or blended learning. Using Groups in Learning & Collaboration Resources, users can participate in discussions with one another, share files, upload videos to request feedback and more. Potential collaborative learning activities include Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), book studies, mentoring and collegial circles. They can be leveraged within the district or even across districts, connecting educators from across the nation to collaborate and share ideas. Groups can also be combined with face-to-face workshops for a more blended experience.

How can we recommend professional learning specifically to our teachers who are in need of improvement?

If your district is using Frontline’s Employee Evaluation Management system, the activities in your Professional Learning Management Catalog can be aligned to recommend professional learning based on evaluation outcomes.

How does Frontline Professional Growth help to streamline professional development management?

Frontline Professional Growth can make your office paperless! We can create your forms online for things such as conferences, graduate courses, salary movements, tuition reimbursements, mentoring plans, mentoring logs, Personal Goal Plans, and more. Then, we help you create an electronic workflow so the form is automatically routed to the appropriate administrators.

Beautiful Dashboards. Real Insights.

Frontline Professional Growth puts the information you need at your fingertips.

See How  

Our district purchased Frontline’s Learning & Collaboration Resources. Can we use those courses in Frontline Professional Growth?

Yes! Resources can be easily added to activities in Professional Learning Management as a source of professional learning. Additionally, districts may upload their own curated resources to the Resource Library. All resources are also available for exploratory learning at any time

Does it integrate with my other software systems?

Frontline Professional Growth integrates with Frontline Absence Management to automatically create an absence and generate a sub request when a PD request requiring a teacher absence is approved.  State-specific integrations are also available.  Additionally, Frontline Professional Growth integrates with other systems via an sFTP process. Frontline provides a list of current integrations here.

How much does it cost?

Frontline Professional Growth is billed as annual subscription based on a per-user license. If you’re interested in using the system, a Frontline representative can discuss your specific needs and send you a proposal.

Does using Frontline Professional Growth save my district time and money?

Yes! By streamlining the submission and approval of forms, evaluation process and access to learning resources, as well as making your data readily available, Frontline Professional Growth saves your administrators time that can be devoted to working with educators to improve student outcomes.

The Cost of Professional Learning:

Do you know your current spend?

Find Out  

What hardware or software do I need to install?

None! Frontline Professional Growth is an entirely web-based solution, so only an Internet connection is required.

Where can I learn more about Frontline Professional Growth?

Visit our solution page for more information about using Frontline Professional Growth.

You may enjoy this hand-picked content:

Best Practices in Professional Learning: Greece Central School District  

 
 

Frontline Professional Growth Frequently Asked Questions (Formerly MyLearningPlan PDMS)

Questions about our professional learning management system formerly known as MyLearningPlan PDMS? You’ve come to the right place!

Here are a few of the most frequent questions we hear from school districts that are researching Frontline Professional Growth. Don’t see your question here? Feel free to contact us!

Why isn’t it called MyLearningPlan PDMS anymore?

MyLearningPlan, a well-known provider of educator professional growth and management tools for K-12 school districts, was acquired on May 1, 2015 by Frontline Education.

Frontline Education is a leading provider of K-12 administrative software. MyLearningPlan PDMS is now part of Frontline Professional Growth, aligning it with the rest of the solutions Frontline Education offers.

How is Frontline Professional Growth different from MyLearningPlan PDMS?

Despite the name change, the software hasn’t changed in terms of functionality — although now the Professional Development Management application is just one part of the broader Frontline Professional Growth solution, which includes tools to manage professional learning, promote coaching and peer collaboration and train and calibrate observers. Our team is working constantly to improve Frontline Professional Growth’s integration with the rest of Frontline’s solutions to provide your district with even better tools.

Why manage professional learning online?

Frontline Professional Growth isn’t about removing the human touch from professional learning. Quite the opposite, actually. By simplifying the professional learning process, compiling forms, goals and PD resources in one place, and improving transparency throughout the whole evaluation process, Frontline Professional Growth helps district leaders cultivate consistent, substantial professional learning for all of their staff. Plus, by giving teachers direct access to their PD resources and evaluation data, teachers can revisit their goals regularly as they seek to grow in their careers.

Can the system help us with collaborative professional learning?

Yes! Our professional learning management system helps create and manage any type of collaborative or blended learning. The program creates Team Rooms where users can participate in discussions with one another, share files and even log their time together. Potential collaborative learning activities include Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), book studies, mentoring and collegial circles. Team Rooms are a great way for users to share work with one another, such as lesson plans based on new learning. Team Rooms can also be combined with face-to-face workshops for a more blended experience.

How can we recommend professional learning specifically to our teachers who are in need of improvement?

If your district is using Frontline’s employee evaluation management system(formerly known as MyLearningPlan OASYS), the activities in your Catalog can be easily aligned to recommended professional learning.

How does Frontline Professional Growth help to streamline professional development management?

Frontline Professional Growth can make your office paperless! We can create your forms online for things such as conferences, graduate courses, salary movements, tuition reimbursements, mentoring plans, mentoring logs, Personal Goal Plans and more. Then, we help you create an electronic workflow so the form is automatically routed to the appropriate administrators.

How does Frontline Professional Growth simplify how we manage forms?

By adding all your forms online within Frontline Professional Growth, the data is easily tracked by not only the end user, but by administration as well. This eliminates the need for spreadsheets to track things like licensure, salary movements, district-required hours and other requirements. Instead, the system replaces your spreadsheets with easily accessible reports, which can always be downloaded to Excel if needed.

Our district purchased Frontline’s course libraries. Can we use those courses in Frontline Professional Growth?

Yes! Content is easily added to the professional learning management system as an additional source of professional learning.

Does it integrate with my other software systems?

Yes. Frontline Professional Growth integrates with other systems via an sFTP process. Frontline provides a list of current integrations here.

How much does it cost?

Frontline Professional Growth is billed as annual subscription based on a per-user license. If you’re interested in using the system, a Frontline representative can discuss your specific needs and send you a proposal.

Does using Frontline Professional Growth save my district time and money?

Yes! By streamlining the submission and approval of forms, our professional learning management system makes your data more visible via our reporting tool. This creates the opportunity for an in-depth analysis of the efficacy of your professional learning processes .

What hardware or software do I need to install?

None! Frontline Professional Growth is an entirely web-based solution, so only an Internet connection is required .

Where can I learn more about Frontline Professional Growth’s employee evaluation management application (formerly MyLearningPlan OASYS)?

For more information about using Frontline Professional Growth for managing observations and evaluations, please visit this page.

Employee Onboarding: Improve First Impressions & Lasting Retention | Part One

For K-12 Human Resources offices, the task of staffing the district for another school year needs to be a two-sided coin, one side focused on getting (recruiting and selection), and the other side focused on keeping (onboarding and retention). Finding the top employees for your district is a complex and time-consuming project, but it is only part of the job. It’s just as important to focus on keeping your district’s top employees engaged and satisfied with their position at the district.

In some organizations, employee onboarding is limited to an orientation event that lasts maybe a few hours on the first 3 or 4 days on the job, but it is really more of an afterthought – the formalities that need to take place once the recruiting and hiring process is over. However, your district’s onboarding process can make a huge impact on the district atmosphere and your colleagues’ regular performance.

Whether thoughtfully crafted or simply superficial, your onboarding process affects the quality of your district’s relationship with its staff and the quality of the staff’s performance in a number of areas, including:

1.  Continuity of services
2.  Consistency in delivery
3.  Reliability & dependability
4.  Maintaining the culture
5.  Cost of replacement training, in dollars and time

While a high rate of employee turnover can result from a number of different factors, making an effort to improve your onboarding process in specific ways can drastically improve employee engagement and retention in your district.

What is Onboarding?

Onboarding is the combination of orientation and induction. The Society for Human Resource Management offers definitions for these two terms:

Orientation

“The introduction of employees to their jobs, co-workers and the organization by providing them with information regarding such items as policies, procedures, company history, goals, culture and work rules.”

Induction

“Programs designed to introduce and acclimate newly hired employees into the organization.”

While orientation and induction make up onboarding, onboarding needs to expand beyond the orientation event for it to be effective. An employee’s onboarding should start upon their acceptance of the job offer and continue through much of the first year, adding engaging practices and knowledge of district culture to the standard processes they learned on their first few days. Effective onboarding needs to be a shared experience.

The Productivity of Pride

Author and onboarding expert David Lee says, “The term ‘Onboarding’ refers to the process of integrating new employees into the organization, of preparing them to succeed at their job, and to become fully engaged, productive members of the organization.”

Fully-engaged, productive employees offer tangible benefits to your district’s overall health and recruiting budget. If you can convert your new hires into engaged district stakeholders, your district will enjoy higher employee retention. This means your district will spend less time and money on recruiting and hiring, orientation, travel and compliance-related regulations.

However, converting new hires into district stakeholders is easier said than done. You must learn to see your employees eye-to-eye and convince them to take up responsibility for the district’s cause alongside of the administrative staff.

David Lee offers one excellent sentiment to strive to create during your onboarding process: pride.

“You can be proud to work here.” If you can communicate this notion to your staff, both verbally (with support for your claim) and through the quality of the onboarding experience, you’ll be on your way to converting your new employees into district ambassadors.

In part two of my onboarding series, I’ll offer advice on how to approach the content of your onboarding process in order to better serve both the district’s and the employees’ needs and to further promote employee engagement and retention.

Is Your District Prepared for a Department of Labor Audit?

A Department of Labor (DOL) audit is the “monster under the bed” for many payroll and business professionals. You don’t want to believe in it. You don’t think you’ll ever see it. But it could pop up at any time, and if it does, it might not look pretty.

With governmental regulations constantly evolving, school districts need to validate their records and check every inch of their practices to make sure they’re not at risk in the case of a DOL audit.

How will I know if my district will be audited by the Department of Labor?

An auditor’s job is to ensure that employees are being paid according to FLSA regulations, as well as other federal and state laws (and that any workers under 18 are being paid according to child labor provisions).

In order to guarantee that these standards are being met in everyday situations, auditors may arrive at your district without prior notice. Generally they will provide a few weeks’ notice to allow you to gather your records, but they’re not required to notify you, and they may choose not to if an employee files a complaint about unlawful pay or practices.

When an auditor does arrive, a few things will happen:

  • They’ll request an extensive list of records for a random group of employees from a random timeframe during the last few years. 
  • They’ll review these records to see if there are any violations or inconsistencies.
  • If you fail to provide the requested documentation, your district will likely fail the audit and be subject to DOL penalties.

What happens if we fail the Department of Labor Audit?

After fully evaluating your records, your auditor will send an official letter stating whether you’ve passed or failed, as well as any reparations that you’ll need to make if you do fail. What exactly your punishments could look like will vary depending on the context of your infringement.

If at least ten “exempt” employees complain that they ought to have received overtime pay for the last two years and the auditor confirms this complaint, you’ll need to provide back pay, under the supervision of the WHD, for those ten employees for those two years and pay an equal amount as liquidated damages, plus any attorney and court fees.

Clearly, it’s possible to incur crippling fines depending on the scope of your infringement. And in the worst of situations, where violations were knowingly incurred, the DOL has stated that “Willful violations may be prosecuted criminally and the violator fined up to $10,000. A second conviction may result in imprisonment.”

(These penalties get far worse if your district employs minor students and violates any child labor laws.)

What should my district be doing to protect itself?

 

Validate Your Classifications

Your district’s employee classification is one of the first things auditors will validate. Classifying employees as exempt from overtime simply because they’re paid on a salary basis is not compliant with FLSA regulations, but this is a common error in many school districts.

Organize Your Records

Another key requirement to preparing for an audit is to make sure you’re storing the required information, and that it is accessible if the auditor requests it.

Improve Your Time and Attendance Tracking

Improve record keeping and workflows by implementing web-based time and attendance system.

Cary Herring, Payroll Specialist from Montgomery ISD, said this about her prior, paper-based process: 

“If you had to pull from past time, you didn’t know where the [former] payroll person had put the timesheets. You have secretaries at different locations figuring out time; some of them are rounding, some of them are not rounding — you have very inconsistent figuring of the time. . . . When we’ve tried to go back and find things from prior times, there were some times you couldn’t find them.”

Cary Herring, Payroll Specialist, Montgomery ISD

That’s why Montgomery ISD switched to a web-based time and attendance program to track and manage their records. “With [the web-based program], everything was set — you have control of it. We knew everything was very consistent — there’s no messes there.”


Track Time and Attendance with Precision

Using a web-based time and attendance system helps you:

  • Automate how overtime is calculated. Getting overtime payments wrong is a major FLSA offender. Hand-keying overtime calculations into payroll systems leads to human error (sometimes overpayment of 1.2%).
  • Determine your district’s number of Full-Time Equivalents (FTE’s), necessary under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
  • Calculate whether an employee has qualified for health benefits during the year, also necessary under ACA. It’s an auditor’s job to notice if your district has done these things.


Prepare for an Audit Regularly

Finally, one of the best ways to prepare yourself for an audit is to perform regular, voluntary audits. (In fact, regular audits may be required. Familiarize yourself with your state regulations and how they override or supplement federal regulations.) Many school districts hire outside auditors to evaluate their processes annually or biannually.

These audits go a long way in validating compliance and preventing fines potentially incurred during a surprise DOL audit. Not only will regular audits verify the legality of your classifications, payment and practices, but the overall experience of the audit will confirm whether you’re managing your records in a reliable and efficient way.

After experiencing several voluntary audits, then transitioning to a web-based time and attendance program, Cary Herring shared:

“It does affect a lot of people. [Before] it took maybe eight hours to pull the documentation. This last time it was very quick. It probably took an hour this time.” 

Cary Herring, Payroll Specialist, Montgomery ISD

Conclusion

If you checked your mail this morning and found a report from the Department of Labor, would you be confident in your processes, or would your gut sink?

4 Reasons Our Substitutes Weren’t Working

Like most school districts, the substitute shortage has affected Elk River School District 728. Over the last three years, our district has struggled to fill all of its open jobs. In recent years, our district has struggled to fill all of its open jobs, which has created a few problems for us.

The Problems of Unfilled Absences

If we can’t get a substitute to fill an absence, we have to parcel out the students in a variety of ways to other teachers who are on the job. Some teachers have had to give up their prep hour to cover a class. In the elementary schools, we sometimes have had to move kids into other classrooms, with teachers doubling up. When we do that, our teachers’ contract requires that we double their pay, too. So we were seeing a huge cost increase, twice as much as it cost us for subs.

Shuffling students had other potential consequences that we were concerned about, too:

  • Quality of learning was likely diminished on those days.
  • Having underprepared teachers who were frustrated about doubling up
  • Students unfamiliar with the teacher they had
  • Overcrowding in the classroom.

Obviously, something needed to be done. The more I looked at it, the more I realized that the problem wasn’t that we didn’t have enough subs on our call list. The issue was getting subs that are on the list to say “yes” to us. We were making declarations about the reason for our problem while sitting here in the district office — and no one had actually asked a substitute. We surveyed our substitutes to learn more about subbing habits, preferences, and issues.

The Survey & What We Learned

We launched a survey electronically to our entire substitute list using Survey Monkey. In the survey, we asked them questions like: How long have you been substituting? At what districts? Which districts do you sub for most? Are there certain teachers or certain shifts you prefer? Would you choose to accept a job at another district over ours? Why?

We had a great response to the survey — 60% of our substitutes participated. From the results, we determined four primary factors that affected our substitutes’ motivation to work in our district.

1. We Needed to Adjust Our Pay Rate & Schedule Structure

We had a two-tiered pay rate schedule in which a substitute could reach the next pay rate within a given school year if they worked 20 full days. However, they’d have to start all over each school year. Naturally, most substitutes said they preferred to work in districts where a pay increase rolled into the following school year. As a solution, we raised our rates, added a third tier, and allowed substitutes — provided that their quality of service remained high — to roll over a pay rate increase from year to year.

2. We Needed to Train Subs on Internal Curriculum and Technology

We found that some substitutes felt unequipped or unprepared for certain educational technologies they found in the classroom, so we created a voluntary training program to help them feel more confident in the classroom.

3. We Needed to Improve Our Communication & Expectations

We found that our substitutes felt a lack of clarity in their roles, especially through:

  • Lapses in communication with the district and school staff at different times.
  • Little to no feedback on their performance, which makes it difficult to learn and improve.
  • Unknowns about what to expect or what is expected of them on a given day.

We want to engage and appreciate our substitutes, and we want them to know what we expect. To curtail some of the issues substitutes are experiencing, we’re working to develop a standard process for them to be onboarded and trained more fully. We’re also defining, documenting and implementing a standard process for providing feedback to substitutes on their performance. We don’t just want to hear about when a substitute trips up; we want to provide encouragement based on positive feedback, and we want to know how well we’re accommodating them.

4. We Needed To Give More Advance Notice

Finally, our substitutes reported that they want notice further in advance for available jobs. Using Frontline Absence & Time, we allow our different buildings and teachers to keep a list of preferred substitutes to work in their classrooms, based on substitute knowledge and past performance. However, we realized that we had made the window of time that other substitutes could see jobs far too small. By the time jobs became visible to them, they had already accepted jobs in other districts.

Now, we still allow our teachers to keep a preferred substitute list, but only for a very limited window of time. We encourage them to prearrange a job if they really need a specific substitute, and we now keep our visibility for all substitutes as open as possible, so that substitutes can see and accept our jobs before making other plans.

Conclusion

If your district is struggling to attract substitutes, make sure you understand your population. Track absence metrics and build reports that show which substitutes are or aren’t working, and what types of jobs they’re accepting, so you can get a better understanding of your district and what substitutes are expecting. If done properly with the right tools, the result will benefit everyone — supervised classrooms at the district and substitutes who are happy and prepared for their work.

Have Your Substitutes Shown Up?

Gone are the days of simply calling up a substitute and considering the absence filled. Even if you use a substitute placement and absence management system to manage the scheduling side, how do you know if the substitute ever actually showed up for the job? How do you know if he or she was on time? How many hours has each substitute actually worked this month? How much time are they spending on district property? What buildings were they in, and can you prove it?

The answers to these questions are critical for vetting your payroll efficiency, your federal compliance and your campus security.

Here are just a few of the benefits of tracking your substitutes’ time and attendance

Tracking substitute time and attendance improves payroll accuracy.

Some districts are still paying their substitutes on a shift by shift or daily basis. That is, districts know a substitute has been assigned to a vacancy, so they pay that substitute a flat rate for that period, or even that whole day, regardless of how many hours the substitute actually worked. In fact, in a lot of cases, the district doesn’t know or have record of the exact number of hours worked.

Generally, this process works. The payroll office cuts checks, and substitutes are happy. But the amount paid is not reflective of the actual time substitutes are working. In some cases, the district may be underpaying or overpaying subs. Neither of these situations is ideal, and evaluating exactly how much you should be spending on substitutes becomes a lot more difficult.

By tracking the actual number of hours a substitute works with an automated time & attendance system, you’ll automatically gain access to exact, comprehensive reporting on the work history of each of your substitutes. You’ll know exactly how many hours they’ve worked, whether they were on time to their classroom, or whether they showed up for their absence at all. And best of all, you’ll know that you’re paying your substitutes accurately according to the hours they’ve worked.

Tracking substitute time and attendance improves FLSA and ACA compliance.

While we’re talking about knowing exactly how much time your substitutes are working, do you know how your current process holds up against evolving FLSA and ACA regulations?

First, are you not tracking substitute time because you’ve classified them as independent contractors instead of employees? Many districts have been hit with classification lawsuits because they assumed that their substitutes were independent contractors rather than employees, and subsequently did not track their hours and pay them accordingly.

Second, how are you managing your long-term substitutes? In these unique situations, overtime and benefits obviously become important costs to calculate.

Third, how are you planning to manage your substitutes’ hours in light of the Affordable Care Act? While 72% of school districts do have plans to track substitute hours for the ACA, 28% are still not tracking their substitutes’ hours. Others have decided to limit their substitutes to 16 days a month to guarantee that substitutes stay beneath the 130 hours-per-month limit. While this approach will work, it’s not the most practical in light of the current substitute shortage.

In all three of these situations, having detailed records of your substitutes’ actual time worked would tell you how you ought to be paying your substitutes. And combined with ACA tools and reporting, those records could prove to be invaluable in determining who needs benefits, and proving it if an auditor comes to your district.

Tracking substitute time and attendance improves campus security.

Accurate pay and compliance aren’t the only benefits from tracking substitute hours. Tracking the time and attendance of all the workers in your district — substitutes included — improves the security of everyone on campus. By having your workers clock in and out of their jobs, you’ll have a record of when they were on district property, and what buildings they were in. Records like this can go a long way in investigating and exonerating individuals if a theft or worse crime occurs.

So what about you? Have your substitutes shown up? Are you prepared to prove it? Comment below to tell us how your school district is managing substitute time and attendance this year.

Hiring to the Test: Ensuring Fairness in the Teacher Selection Process

This post originally appeared on EducationWeek, K-12 Talent Manager Blog by Emily Douglas-McNab on November 4, 2014. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Many school districts I speak with across the country are examining how they recruit and hire great educators and other staff. I think this is positive as having a great recruiting and teacher selection process can ensure your organization is looking for new candidates in the right places and using the right measures to select the best person for the job!

As part of these conversations, many districts have mentioned creating their own selection “test” that asks new hires a series of questions, and then the district would use the results as one measure to inform hiring. There are also many vendors who offer such tests. It sounds like a great idea…and one that could be done for relatively low cost, right? Not always.

If districts are considering the use of selection tests, they should be concerned about disparate impact.

What is disparate impact?

Disparate impact is a term that HR people, employment law attorneys, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) use to describe when an employer uses tests and other measures to choose job applicants, and then “disproportionately excludes people in a particular group by race, sex, or another covered basis, unless the employer can justify the test or procedure under the law.”

The Law

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA); the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967; and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 all note the use of discriminatory employment tests and selection procedures as illegal. According to the EEOC, selection measures could include but are not limited to, physical ability tests that measure strength or stamina; cognitive tests assessing math or reading comprehension, memory, reasoning, or the knowledge of a particular job or function; sample job tasks such as work samples or performance testing; personality and integrity tests measuring certain dispositions; credit checks; English proficiency exams; medical examinations such as psychological tests or assessments of physical health; and/or criminal background checks.

When it comes to tests, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act allows employers to ‘test’ candidates as long as the test is NOT “designed, intended, or used to discriminate because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” (42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(h)) Title VII also places restrictions on altering or adjusting scores as well as having moving cut-off scores for different groups of applicants. (42 U.S.C. §2000e-2(l))

Disparate Treatment vs. Disparate Impact

Title VII prohibits both “disparate treatment” and “disparate impact” discrimination. The difference between the two is that one is intentional discrimination (disparate treatment) and the other occurs as an effect of testing.

According to the EEOC, disparate treatment cases typically involve evidence of bias such as discriminatory statements or people being openly treated differently due to their race, color, religion, or national origin. Further, an example scenario given by the EEOC on an employment facts sheet shows how this might look in reality. “Title VII forbids a covered employer from testing the reading ability of African American applicants or employees but not testing the reading ability of their white counterparts.” While an example, this was taken from a real court case of disparate treatment, Griggs v. Duke Power Company (1970).

Disparate impact is different from treatment. The EEOC notes that, “Title VII also prohibits employers from using neutral tests or selection procedures that have the effect of disproportionately excluding persons based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, where the tests or selection procedures are not “job-related and consistent with business necessity.”” An example scenario would be that an organization requires that all applicants pass a strength test and the result is that all women are disproportionately screened out. While an example, this is the situation behind the disparate impact case EEOC v. Dial Corp.

How do you know if your selection measures disparately impact a particular group? A statistical analysis! (And they say HR people don’t “do” math… psh!)

The Bottom Line

Candidate Lessons

As a job candidate, asking bluntly if a selection test or question is “illegal” may put you on the employer’s do-not-call list (which, sadly, happens every day). Rather, if you are uncomfortable with a specific test, I suggest asking in a calm, cool, collected, and professional manner how it aligns to the job and how it is consistent with business necessity.

Employer Lessons

If you’re buying a test, be cautious and do your homework (just because others around you are buying a tool doesn’t mean you have to as well). It never hurts to check with your legal counsel. Further, ask the vendor for information on EEOC disparate impact. If they are unwilling to provide such information, or do not know what you are talking about, you should have a conversation with other leaders in the organization, including legal counsel, to decide the best course of action.

One vendor that develops selection tests for teacher candidates provides an EEOC Four-Fifths Report. It notes that:

According to the EEOC Four-Fifths rule, “A selection rate for any race, sex, or ethnic group which is less than four-fifths of the rate for the group with the highest rate will generally be regarded by federal enforcement agencies as evidence of adverse impact. The percent of applicants scoring at 72% or higher between each subgroup pair in the overall database is within the four-fifths guidelines; thus, the classification system indicates no disparate results.”

This is FANTASTIC and exactly what any organization should be looking for when considering a selection test. It also never hurts to collect your own data to ensure that the reports are accurate. If you’re creating a selection test, be cautious, do your homework, check with your legal counsel, and collect the appropriate data to ensure you’re not disparately impacting a group of individuals. Run the test yourself, and then check again with your legal counsel.

The bottom line as a K-12 Talent Manager is that if your organization is considering a selection test from a vendor or designing one in house, be very careful and do your due diligence, as one misstep could be very costly. Note: This blog does not serve as legal advice. If you still have questions about disparate impact or treatment, contact your HR department. If you are in the HR department and have questions, call your district legal counsel for advice.

5 Ways to Support a Legally Defensible K-12 Teacher Hiring Process

We all want the best candidates filling vacancies in our school systems. Regardless of the position we are looking to fill, be it a classroom teacher, a superintendent or a bus driver, we want the person who will outperform our expectations and make our school community a better place.

Although we will move mountains in search of the best candidate, we must be mindful that we do so in a manner that is legally defensible. Meaning, our desire to have the “best” person cannot be more important than our obligation to adhere to a fair hiring process in the eyes of the law.

Here are some important practices to keep in mind for maintaining and defending a fair hiring process.

1. Advertise vacancies to a wide range of candidates

Part of supporting a fair hiring process is offering jobs to a diverse range of candidates – and being able to prove that you did so.

Many districts are uncovering new ways to attract more candidates, including using popular K-12 job boards and social media tools. K12JobSpot.com is a popular job board for educational positions, with more than 12 million visits to the website last year. Other popular job boards include EdWeek’s TopSchoolJobs.com, Indeed.com, SimplyHired.com and Teach.org.

Districts are also expanding the reach of their open positions by posting them on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

While these efforts can be time-consuming, some web-based recruiting tools integrate with these outlets, allowing you to easily reach a broad audience and prove that you’ve done so.

2. Develop objective and compliant hiring criteria

To support a legally defensible hiring process, you need to remove as much subjectivity as possible. For example, do you know if all your principals are using the same interview questions? Discrepancies like this could cause questionable inconsistencies in your hiring process.

First of all, establish a library of uniform and compliant job descriptions. In building these descriptions, make sure that each description adheres to FLSA, FMLA, and ADA regulations. As descriptions are updated, you will want to share these with your entire hiring team, so everyone has the same version. Some applicant tracking systems come with a pre-built library of compliant K-12 job descriptions to make this process easier.

Second, you will want to use a consistent set of objective criteria for filtering through applicants. You can compile your own criteria or use an existing applicant screening tool. An electronic applicant recruiting system will then allow you to filter through large volumes of applications based on objective criteria (i.e. academic credentials, years of experience) versus race, gender or order of application.

Third, ensure all your hiring team members are using consistent interview questions. Providing a list of approved and compliant questions that all members use will help eliminate bias in the interview process and prevent claims of discrimination.

3. Maintain a communication audit trail

Keeping a record of all communication that took place during the interview process will help your district defend your hiring process if an applicant files a complaint against your district.

While you probably have record of all your email communication, consider also documenting interactions over the phone and in person. Finding an applicant tracking system that includes an electronic communication log makes this documentation much simpler.

4. Protect sensitive information

Including a large number of people in the interview process aids in unbiased evaluation of candidates. However, it can also increase the risk of sensitive data getting in front of the wrong people and even leaking outside your district. Documenting sensitive information on paper poses a higher risk than using online systems, where you can control individual permissions and encrypt data.

5. Report on employee diversity

You know how challenging it is to comply with EEOC and the variety of other requirements to ensure fair hiring. However, documenting your due diligence in these areas is crucial to avoiding potential compliance violations.

Web-based reporting tools, whether canned reports or an ad-hoc reporting tool, will make it easier to see the story behind your recruiting and hiring efforts.

Hiring great candidates for your district should always be your first priority. But protecting against legal infringements — or even the appearance of them — makes that task far more difficult. Proactively taking these steps to ensure that your hiring process is fair and defensible will give you the time and peace of mind necessary to freely recruit the very best for your district and the students for whom you are responsible.

Four Reasons Districts Are Switching to Web-Based Time & Attendance Systems

Odds are you aren’t lighting your hallways with torches. You aren’t using candles in the cafeteria or lanterns in the classrooms; electricity was discovered quite some time ago. And with that discovery came a new era of industry, innovation and opportunity. That era forever changed the way we work and is rivaled only by the innovation of the Digital Age.

Likewise, it’s no surprise that two-thirds of companies have embraced this new digital age by ditching old time and attendance tracking methods in exchange for web-based HR solutions. It is surprising, however, that a disproportionate number of school districts fall into that final one-third — those using outdated and risk-prone paper methods to track their time and attendance.

The good news is that each month, dozens of these school districts dip their toes in the electronic-time-and-attendance water (that sounds more dangerous than it is), and they’re saving a lot of time and money because of it.

Here are four reasons districts are tossing their paper and moving to web-based time and attendance systems.

Reason 1: Accountability

School districts that still use a paper time and attendance system have an unavoidable accountability problem. It’s no secret that employees can and have made mistakes on their timesheets or even intentionally misrepresented their time. Web-based time and attendance software increases the accountability of your employees by tracking the actual time they work. Timesheet approvers can see those actual time punches (and rounded time, if applicable) to get an accurate record of when their employees actually worked as well as what building they clocked in and out of in the case of a crime or emergency.

Unfortunately, school districts’ accountability problem does not end with employees submitting incorrect or falsified timesheets. Perhaps the most prevalent accountability problem districts report is that of their principals, secretaries or other timesheet approvers rubber stamping those erroneous timesheets. This is a people problem, one that no time tracking software can ultimately solve. But that doesn’t mean a time and attendance program can’t improve overall accountability.

Paperless timesheets carry a record of who has edited, submitted or approved a timesheet along with the exact time that action took place. In addition, you can require your approver to certify the validity of the information being approved, as well as to enter a digital signature PIN to confirm he or she is the person making the approvals. These measures can go a long way in ensuring appropriate work is put into evaluating each timesheet.

Reason 2: Compliance

A second problem school districts face is compliance. With the full effects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare) looming, plus FLSA and FMLA regulations, districts are scrambling to prove their compliance.

The problem? A lot of districts can’t even claim with confidence that they are compliant. With large filing cabinets stuffed with paper records, proving compliance is at best a tedious process.

Dana Lang
A+ Charter Schools

“Before, we were required to keep about seven years of paper records in notebooks, in filing cabinets.”

Then throw in this fact: paper gets lost.

Liz Walton
Contoocook Valley School District

“Two years ago [we were] terrible at using the paper time slips. We would have inconsistency on people reporting their hours. We would have lost time slips that would appear months later because they were in interoffice envelopes that didn’t come to the right person. Time slips would not be signed or approved by the approvers.”

Auditors aren’t going to overlook these problems, and they won’t enjoy a long wait while you track down the records they’ve requested. This is one of the major reasons so many many districts, like A+ Charter Schools, have chosen to implement a web-based time and attendance system.

Dana Lang
A+ Charter Schools

“At this time, they keep it online for us, in the cloud. I don’t keep any paper records. Everything is online and virtual.”

Department of Labor audits are nothing to take lightly, especially once ACA regulations are in full swing. In response, many districts have elected to implement a web-based system along with regular internal audits to ensure they’re ready when the DOL comes knocking.

Reason 3: Efficiency

The third problem school districts face is that of simple efficiency. Managing even a small school district is no simple feat. You’ve got teachers, subs, aides, maintenance, custodians, food service, secretaries, principals and more — each spread across multiple schools — all reporting to your payroll department.

Let’s say you use a paper method for your time and attendance tracking; even in the best of scenarios — where all timesheets are approved and on time, and every location has been appropriately enforcing the same standards — you’re still left with piles of paper that you then need to verify and manually enter into your payroll system. That alone takes a lot of unnecessary manual work, and that’s assuming a best case scenario.

Liz Walton from Contoocook Valley School District says, “Part of our issues in collecting those time slips would be due to a delay of school, or a snow day, or even just because somebody is out. In those particular cases when that happens, I would spend time chasing down people, whether by phone or by email, trying to get a hold of whoever is missing to get me their information as soon as possible, which could also mean a day or two delay of getting it to me.”

Some school districts spend a disproportionate amount of time just tracking records down and reentering information from paper into their payroll system. That time is an expensive resource, and with web-based time and attendance software, you can reallocate that resource to other areas that don’t get enough time.

Dana Lang
A+ Charter Schools

“What used to take us about three weeks to do has now gone down to about three days on my campus users’ part, and when it gets to me, it was only about 15 minutes.”

Finally, and most obviously, a web-based time and attendance program makes your paper consumption more efficient. You’ve probably already figured out how. But does the word paperless scare you? Even if you’re just looking to cut down on your paper use, not get rid of it entirely, time and attendance software can go a long way in optimizing your process.

Lori Hobbs
Millsap ISD

“We were using a paper-based system, and to store the reports for our district, which is a small district, it took a whole file box to store a year’s reports and we had to cram it in there for it to even fit.  Now with the [web-based] system, I have a very nice report, and it probably fits in three inches for a whole year. So the consumption of paper is much better and we don’t have to have the storage that we did, because in small districts we don’t have storage places either.”

Reason 4: Accuracy

The fourth main problem school districts are facing (and one that directly informs the first three problems) is that of accuracy. You already know that paper timesheets require you to manually enter time into your payroll system, which is expensive in regard to time, but do you know how much it’s costing you in errors?

Nucleus Research, the American Payroll Association and the Aberdeen Group have all done studies showing that organizations overpay their employees by an average of 1.2% due to human error — representing $120,000 in payroll errors for every $10 million in payroll wages. They have also shown that electronic time and attendance systems can eliminate up to 95% of this cost. How much could you save with 95% more accuracy?

Automatic savings, in combination with accountability, compliance and efficiency, make staying with antiquated paper time and attendance methods a costly mistake. Will you join the thousands of school districts that have already embraced the future of web-based time and attendance systems?

A Call for Divergent Leadership

Originally written for the AppliTrack “Hire Greatness Today” publication

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air. (Gray)

English poet Thomas Gray wrote “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” to honor the millions who had died before him, the poor, the hapless, the unrecognized, those who lived and died with little notice from others. In his poem he openly declares a profound respect and appreciation for them, realizing unfortunately that many had natural abilities of greatness that could not reach fruition because they lacked either the finances or the education.

There are many potential teachers and administrators who have that innate ability to lead, to guide, to bring out the best in others, but they are not tapped: they go unrecognized because they may not be the same color or may not be deemed the brightest or may not have right economic background to be discovered. Yet, they are “there,” many already in the classrooms or lower echelons of administrative leadership, but they go under-appreciated and under-valued because they may be slightly different. The innate, raw talent, the ability to motivate, the industry and ethics to serve others, the listener who has the Joban patience to weigh before passing judgment, the administrator/teacher who can listen and explain and accept questioning and challenges but smile — these are the people with the leadership skills that could revitalize an entire administrative staff, change the direction of a school climate or culture, who can recognize and utilize the talents of the members of his or her staff and team, and who can sometimes dust the surface of a former principal’s desk and take charge himself or herself and thrive in the process. The unrecognized, those possessing the natural but untapped resources that go under-utilized, those who for any number of inexcusable excuses remain hidden, beautiful flowers in the desert lost because of displacement — that truly diverse group of men and women who could make a difference in young people’s lives and in their communities, either dwindle into mediocrity or leave a profession that never lends them a voice or listens if they find one to discover potential greatness in some other occupation that values character more than color, gender, religion, etc.

A key word in all levels of education today is diversity, commonly used in current professional academic articles somewhere within the body. Teachers are taught and administratively directed to embrace, interact, and internalize their diverse student populations in every way: culturally, sociologically, socioeconomically, sexually and religiously. That would be in the classroom. What about the rooms of the administration in district offices? Are they practicing the ideas that they mandate their teachers to follow? Do they assist or resist systematic, authentic integration of diversity in the hiring of administrative personnel in K-12? Are they practitioners of what they preach?

When I was small, I remember a little chorus that we used to sing in children’s church: “Jesus loves the little children. All the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.” Too young and innocent to understand the complexity of a world composed of multiple nationalities (then it was predominantly black and white to me), I did not appreciate the words to that song. Years later, when I recall that tune, it means so much more: not merely for its implications of religiosity, but because I now understand that the world is fabricated of infinite variations of ethnicities, languages and dialects, religions and rituals, regions, politics, gender roles, and cultural values. I have grown to value the differences in all those areas, the varieties offering the proverbial “spice of life.” Those varieties should be celebrated, understood, and unitive, not divisive; such is the purpose of education. Administrative leadership must abide by those same principles and purpose.

According to The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), “During the 2011-12 school year, there were an estimated 115,540 principals of K-12 schools in the United States; 89,810 were public school principals and 25,730 were private school principals. Among public school principals, 80 percent were non-Hispanic White, 10 percent were non-Hispanic Black or African American, 7 percent were Hispanic, and 3 percent were another race/ethnicity… The percentage of public school principals who were female was 52 percent overall, 64 percent in primary schools, 42 percent in middle schools, 30 percent in high schools, and 40 percent in combined schools.” (Bitterman, Goldring, Gray, & Broughman, 2013)

As the population of the United States changes, with the increasing numbers of minorities (African American and Hispanic), eventually and statistically the white population will become the minority. As that ethnic transformation occurs and as it becomes increasingly evident in teachers’ classrooms, the traditional and still prevailing color of the principal in charge of those students remains predominantly white. The balance between the classroom population and the occupants of the principals’ offices should possibly be of concern. What can be done? What must HR do? Human Resources must strive to increase district initiatives and revise district strategic plans to accommodate possibilities. They must offer incentives in recruitment and build stronger partnerships with local universities and businesses. Designing programs to keep graduating minority students in their area, increasing the number of student internships, and building supportive internal leadership programs, in essence they can “grow their own.” They can scour universities nationwide, identifying and soliciting a broader variety of candidates. They can renew and cement current relationships with politicians, parents, and stakeholders, demonstrating mutual support, collaboration, and community interest and involvement.

I am not suggesting racism here. I am, however, suggesting the particularly myopic vision of school leadership of the past, often not intentional but simply mirrored, should lend itself to a certain color blindness in the future. Potential academic leaders of color, regardless of color, should be solicited and groomed for future positions in the higher echelons of leadership in public schools. The faces of the administrative team in the main office should somewhat reflect the teachers before their classes and the students populating their classrooms. Too, I am not suggesting racial quotas, affirmative action either: the best leaders should lead, but the best leaders must also be cognizant of the homogeneity of color in administrative meetings. The best leaders strive to create a culture of good followers, and among those strong followers must be those capable of good leadership. Those prospective leaders should be encouraged and mentored and invited onto the administrative team. The exceptionality of the great leader proves true not only in his or her ability to lead but also his or her ability to inspire and create new leaders.

The leadership colors of the future are “red and yellow, black and white.” That must be the goal, and what better way can we present leaders ensure and invest in future leadership than to hone the skills of potential leaders through mentorship? Let them follow us now to lead into a more reflective and appropriate “stained glass” future.

Work Cited
Bitterman, A, Goldring, R., Gray, L., & Broughman, S. (2013, August). Characteristics of Public and Private Elementary and Secondary School Principals in the United States: Results From the 2011-12 Schools and Staffing Survey. NCES 2013-313, U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, 3. Retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013313.pdf.