District Snapshot

Background

District Location

Nacogdoches, TX

Employees in Payroll

1,008

Students

5,766

Schools

9

Frontline Solutions

Absence Management Time & Attendance Professional Growth Recruiting and Hiring Human Capital Analytics

Before Frontline

After Frontline

Before Frontline

Hiring was slow and manual. It could take about a month to move from recommendation to contract, and the district sometimes lost candidates to faster districts.

After Frontline

Hiring is much faster. The district now moves candidates from hire recommendation to contract, credentials, and laptop setup in about one week max, or 48 hours if they were already background checked.

Before Frontline

Substitute staffing was limited and reactive. Subs were only hired once a month, and fill rates were often around 30%, forcing principals to scramble for coverage.

After Frontline

Substitute coverage improved significantly. Frontline helped Nacogdoches ISD strengthen substitute coverage, increasing pickup rates by about 40% and giving campuses a better chance of filling absences before learning was disrupted.

Before Frontline

HR processes were spread across paper forms and separate systems. That made records harder to track and gave leaders less visibility into staffing and turnover patterns.

After Frontline

HR now has a more connected system. “Everything lives in Central,” making records easier to access and giving the district better visibility into staffing and turnover trends.

From a Month-Long Process to a One-Week Turnaround

At Nacogdoches ISD, the need to modernize HR was easy to quantify. Before Frontline, moving a candidate from recommendation for hire to contract could take about a month. In a competitive labor market, that lag made the district vulnerable to faster-moving neighbors. Charles “Z” Zemanek, Director of Human Resources, had seen the fallout firsthand: “By the time we realized they were no longer interested, I’d have to start the month all over again.” 

Today, the district’s process looks very different. “From recommendation to hire to getting you situated with your laptop and your credentials and contract, it’s about a one-week process, max,” Zemanek said. “If you have already been background checked before, we typically can get you turned over in about 48 hours.” The improvement is measurable, but it also signals something more important for district leaders: speed now supports readiness, staffing stability, and a better first experience for employees. 

A District Leader Who Had Lived the Problem

Zemanek came to HR with a perspective shaped by nearly every side of the employee experience. Over roughly 10 years at Nacogdoches ISD, he served as a science teacher, assistant principal, and opening principal for the early childhood center before moving into district HR. That path matters because it gave him a campus-level view of the costs of slow, fragmented systems. “I was experiencing it from the flip end as a campus stakeholder,” he said. “I’ve not come from a traditional HR background by any means.” 

With 1,008 employees and about 600 roles that may require substitute coverage, HR delays had consequences well beyond the central office. They affected principals trying to staff campuses, hourly employees waiting to start earning, and new hires trying to arrive ready on day one. What Zemanek brought to the work was not only process ownership, but a practical understanding of how HR decisions play out in schools. 

When the Process Was Built Around Paper

Before the district adopted Frontline, the workflow was manual, sequential, and easy to stall. Filling vacancies started with a literal pink sheet of paper that moved through campus mail. After that came handoffs, signatures, background checks, and more waiting. 

Onboarding was just as cumbersome. New hires all came to the district on certain days, sat through large paper-heavy sessions, and signed so many forms that the experience felt less like a welcome and more like a transaction. “It was like signing for a new car,” Zemanek said. Even after hire, employees still had to move across separate systems for technology, credentials, professional learning, and compliance. Applicants who were not selected often did not receive clear closure, and substitute hiring happened only once a month. The result was an employee experience that felt fragmented from the start. 

Why the District Wanted a More Cohesive Approach

For Zemanek, the answer was not to patch one workflow at a time. The district needed a more connected employee lifecycle, from recruiting and onboarding to absences, staffing visibility, learning, and compliance. That vision was shaped by changing workforce expectations as much as by internal inefficiency. 

“Everybody wants transparency,” Zemanek said. “They’re doing everything on their phones.” One teacher’s comment captured how much employee expectations had changed: “I literally just closed on a loan for my house, and I never had to go anywhere in person to do it.” In other words, technology had already made major tasks easier in everyday life, while the district’s onboarding process still felt unnecessarily cumbersome. Zemanek wanted something more coherent for employees and more manageable for the district. “I wanted it to be a one stop shop for them,” he said. 

After reviewing options with stakeholders across the district, Nacogdoches ISD chose Frontline because, in his words, “Frontline was the one that we all agreed had the most cohesive integration across the platforms.” The choice reflected a district decision to rethink the whole employee experience, not just speed up one transaction. 

Implementation Focused on Adoption, Not Just Software

That decision still had to work in a real district, with employees who had been doing things the same way for decades. Zemanek anticipated resistance. “You’re going to have a lot of internal friction from people that have done this a certain way for 20 or 30 years,” he said. So, the rollout emphasized change management alongside technology: in-person training, vendor-led resources, quick links on the district website, single sign-on, and coordination with technology staff. 

Just as important, the district redesigned key steps instead of simply digitizing old paper routes. A designated HR specialist now discusses salary and next steps earlier in the process, candidates upload documents directly, and leadership approvals can happen on mobile device when needed. Zemanek’s view of the rollout was that “it wasn’t that difficult.” He added that with Frontline they “had great consultants.” The combination of workflow redesign and implementation support helped the district move faster without making the process harder for the people who had to use it. 

Faster Hiring Changed the Candidate Experience

The most visible result is a much shorter path to starting work. What once took about a month can now take about a week, including contract, credentials, and laptop setup. New hires move through a clearer process with fewer steps and less back-and-forth. “You’re dealing with one person,” Zemanek said. Instead of waiting weeks for paperwork, salary conversations, and system access, candidates can move from recommendation to being ready to start in about a week. 

That matters especially for paraprofessionals and hourly staff, for whom processing delays affect real earnings. It also reduces the risk of losing candidates after a campus has already made a choice. In Zemanek’s words, “We get them rolling.” The process is no longer just faster on paper; it is better aligned to how quickly someone can actually start work fully set up.

Better Substitute Coverage Helped Protect Classrooms

The gains have extended well beyond initial hiring. Substitute staffing had been another pressure point, with trainings held only once a month and previous fill rates often around 30%. Now the district can move substitute applicants through the process more continuously, and the fill rate has improved significantly. “We’re averaging about a 70% pickup rate, whereas prior to this last year, I’d be lucky if we hit 30%,” Zemanek said. 

For schools, that improvement is not just an HR metric. Stronger substitute coverage means more classrooms stay staffed, and principals spend less time improvising when absences occur. As Zemanek put it, “If I don’t have a sub, I’m spending manpower hours trying to figure out, okay, where do I put these kids? I’m disrupting learning.” Absence Management has also made daily execution easier by allowing teachers to attach lesson plans from home, which gives substitutes more direction and reduces last-minute scrambling. 

More Visibility Across the Employee Lifecycle

Frontline has also changed what HR can see and act on. “Everything lives in Frontline Central,” Zemanek said, a shift that has improved document retrieval and reduced the risk of records disappearing in campus files. More importantly, it has given the district better visibility into staffing patterns and turnover. 

Nacogdoches ISD still hovers around 25% annual turnover, and Zemanek does not present that as a solved problem. What has changed though is the district’s ability to spot patterns and ask better questions. “We see that there are heat maps across the district of where that turnover rate is higher than average,” he said. In some cases, that shifts the conversation away from focusing only on the employees who leave and toward the conditions around them: “The question is no longer, ‘What are these people doing?’ The question is, ‘What are you doing as a supervisor?’” That kind of visibility gives the district a clearer foundation for more informed leadership conversations. 

Building the Next Layer of Value

The story is still expanding. The district is beginning to connect evaluations, professional learning, and compliance more intentionally, and Zemanek sees that work as early but promising. “We’re only now scratching the surface, I think, of what we can do with Professional Learning Management,” he said. Principals can offer more targeted learning options, content specialists are building reusable training assets, and compliance tracking is easier to document and defend. “It’s providing us a really good way to go back and show what we’ve done in a good faith effort as a district,” Zemanek said. “We have the documentation.” 

For him, that practical improvement connects to a larger leadership philosophy. He describes the work as creating better conditions for people to succeed. Zemanek is a gardener by hobby. He uses that experience to poetically compare district staff to the plants he cares for.  “All you can do really is cultivate the appropriate conditions for that plant, but it will thrive on its own if its conditions are right,” he said. “Every plant is different. So just like a plant, every person that walks through our office is different. We just need to provide the right conditions for them to thrive.” At Nacogdoches ISD, that philosophy now shows up in measurable ways: a hiring process reduced from about a month to about a week,  substitute fill rates over twice what they were before Frontline,  and a more connected experience that helps the district move faster, support staff more clearly, and make better decisions over time.