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How Cullman City’s one-person HR office connected hiring, technology, and payroll without adding staff.
Cullman City Schools in Cullman, Alabama.
Location
Cullman, Alabama
Schools
5 schools
Enrollment
About 3,226
Teachers & Staff
382.70 FTE
HR Staff
1
Cullman City Schools is a five-school city system, plus the Central Office, in north Alabama serving about 3,226 students. Its entire HR department is one person, Nicole Robinson, who also runs payroll. Before 2023 the district had no HR management system — hiring requests were typed into Word forms and tracked on a spreadsheet, and when a new employee started, often no one in IT or other vital departments knew they existed.
Robinson brought in Frontline Central in 2023 to fix one specific problem: to make sure new hires arrived in the classroom ready to go. She started by digitizing their onboarding packet, then expanded their use of Central to other areas. Three years later, purchase orders, expense reports, field trip requests, resignations, contracts, and transfers all run through the same system.
Nicole Robinson has been at Cullman City since February 2021. Before that she spent five years in HR at another Alabama district, and ten years before that at a company that makes ERP software widely used by Alabama districts. She earned a master’s in management and HR and her SHRM-CP in 2021, and she has seen the hire-to-payroll problem from both sides.
Her actual job is harder to describe. She handles FMLA, imports leave and time clock data, does payroll budgeting, writes contracts, and kicks off onboarding whenever the board approves new hires. “Defining what I do between 8 and 4:30 is not easy,” she said.
Last summer the district hired 36 people. Asked how many were on her HR team, she answered, “Just me.”
When a principal had a vacancy, the request started as a Word document. It went to the superintendent’s secretary, who checked it against a spreadsheet she maintained by hand of every position in the district. Then when a new hire accepted, Robinson would send out onboarding paperwork. “I would actually email them the paperwork, and they would have to give it back to me.”
Asked what information she found herself entering more than once, she said, “Everything.” The general information form fed her ERP, then it fed Frontline, and each pass was by hand. “It was really all manual.”
Retyping data was tedious, and nobody downstream knew a hire had happened. The technology department makes the badges and creates the email addresses, and it often found out about a new hire when someone came looking. Principals would call asking why a new teacher couldn’t log in yet, and often Robinson couldn’t tell them.
Getting employee data into the student information system, the state system that houses every student and employee in Alabama, took a workaround. “I would have to do print screens, or I would have to give them an employee number,” she said. “That was the mess.” Pressed on the single biggest problem, she said, “The biggest hurdle back then was the communication between each department.”
Robinson evaluated three HR management systems: Frontline Central, the HR module from her ERP vendor, and one other. What decided it was where the data went afterward. Cullman City already ran Frontline Absence Management and Time & Attendance, so a new hire had to end up in both no matter which product won. “It allowed me to put one thing in Central, and it went to Absence Management and Time & Attendance,” she said. The ERP vendor’s module would have pushed data into the ERP and stopped there. The third would have populated the student information system and stopped there. Either way she would have been hand-keying into Frontline afterward.
She built onboarding first. “I wanted the pieces to connect me with technology department.”
A new hire gets entered into the staff directory and invited at their personal email address, since they don’t have a district email yet. The packet goes out next: three or four types depending on employee category, the main one carrying twelve or thirteen documents. The I-9 inside it, which she rebuilt herself, is due three days after the hire date.
When a new hire completes the general information form, it routes to the staffer in technology who creates the Cullman Cats email address, then to the person who maintains the student information system, then back to Robinson. Neither of them sees Social Security numbers or birthdates. That one rule ended the phone calls, because now there’s an answer when a principal asks. “You can’t give them an email because they didn’t fill out their general information yet, which is our trigger.”
Once onboarding worked, Robinson looked at everything else on her desk.
“If I can put it in Central, I will put it in Central.”
Purchase orders show what she means when she talks about routing. An employee enters items and attaches receipts, it goes to the bookkeeper for funds and the GL number, to the principal for approval, back to the bookkeeper for a PO number, then back to the employee. “They have the pretty PDF that they can send to the vendor.” A field trip request goes further, picking up a bus number and a nurse coverage check.
Then schools started asking her. “The high school reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, can we put this in Central?’ ‘Yes, we can. What do you want on there?'” Resignations, retirements, contract requests, transfer requests, video permission forms, an orientation memo, and a PEEHIP enrollment form followed. The secretary who assembles board agendas stopped waiting on paper. “She doesn’t have to wait on signatures from a manual sheet of paper. She doesn’t have to wait for inter-office mail.”
Robinson doesn’t oversell it. She still enters new hires into the ERP, and still prints the finished packet for her folder. She has not built an offboarding workflow yet. “No, I do not do anything there, but I want to.” Central sits between the applicant tracking system and the ERP. And nobody misses the paper. “I’ve never heard anybody go, ‘Why can’t we do this on paper anymore?'”
“I love it. I only have high praise for it.”
Asked what she’d say to a district considering Central, Robinson opened with four words. “Put it all in there.”
It takes some setup, she explained. “Building the forms themselves may take a little bit of time, getting the routing and everything correct, but in the long run, it works.” She said she still comes out ahead: it’s easier than a paper form, faster than a paper form, and it gets where it’s supposed to go.
She makes the same case to peers, presenting at the AASBO conference with Central on the screen. “This is how I do my purchase orders, my expense reports, this is how I do all this, my onboarding, everything is within Central.”
She also points to the control it gives her over the forms themselves. “I don’t have to wait on a third party to change any forms that I need corrected or added. I have the ability to make those changes on my time and to my own instruction, and I don’t have to pay extra cost to do that.” In Alabama, she said, that matters more than people realize: some vendors want thousands of dollars just to change a form to reflect a new format or add some wording. “Central gives me the control, not the vendor.”
Cullman City didn’t add an HR position. What it added was a set of rules about where information goes, written by the person already carrying all of it. The principal who needs a new teacher to have an email address on Monday gets one, because the form that creates it did its job on Friday. The new hire sorting out insurance has her PEEHIP ID in the same packet as her I-9. None of it is dramatic. “But I enjoy using it,” Robinson said.
Request a demo and we’ll walk through onboarding, forms, and routing using your district’s own process.
