Every educator needs a back-to-school checklist.
With K12 workforce management, there are so many activities and details to track, as well as exciting opportunities to shift programs for meaningful impact. And there are also those must-have tasks for HR administrators and principals to set up personnel for the new year.
But sometimes, these checklists start to sound exactly the same year to year:
- Send the employee handbook out to staff to review…
- Update employee profiles and contact information…
- Hire and train new teachers…
And so on.
If this pattern sounds familiar, then your back-to-school checklist may be in danger of slipping into the realm of “business as usual” — becoming more like a habit than true innovation and growth.
But what if you’re looking for a strategic, sustainable, and successful start to the year? If you want to increase fill rates, engage your substitutes more deeply, and give teachers precious time back to do what they do best, you need more than “business as usual.”
You need the Four Rs: Reflect, revise (or revitalize), reach out, and revisit.
These four core strategies and practices will help school and district leaders charged with cultivating smooth workforce management, from hiring to absence coverage to time tracking. Let’s take a closer look!
Reflect: Examine What Worked and What Didn’t
Kickstart back-to-school planning by . . . pausing to reflect. Yes, that sounds counterintuitive. However, it’s essential to take this time to figure out what’s working well, what’s not working, and what new challenges or opportunities need to be addressed in the upcoming school year.
Hiring
An obvious place to start is with your organization’s hiring experience. More likely than not, school and district leadership will face at least some change in personnel between school years. And in a time when both full-time and substitute teachers are in short supply, smooth and easy hiring processes make a huge difference in encouraging high-quality candidates to apply for (and hopefully accept!) your open positions.
Here are a few guiding questions to help you start examining your past experiences:
- How well did your hiring tools support your job applicants to move through the process? Did applicants successfully “convert?” Meaning, did they finish the entire process, or did they drop out midway through the application form?
- How much effort did applicant tracking require from your hiring team? Could they easily see where in the interview process each applicant was and key information about each applicant?
- What did communication between your hiring team and applicants look like? Were there redundancies or extra steps involved to keep all applicants informed of their interviewing status?
Red Rover’s hiring solution is designed to help districts save time and energy while attracting top talent to their classrooms. Learn more about how we can work with your team.
Absence and Substitute Management
Next, focus on your absence and substitute management experience. In addition to reviewing quantitative data, such as fill rates and total substitute-absence coverage, gather input directly from your substitutes and in-house teaching staff. Their feedback can highlight bright spots — as well as headaches — within these workflows that may not be obvious from the numbers alone.
Try these guiding questions to get started:
- Which substitutes gave the most time to your schools or most frequently covered absences? What about those who filled the fewest absences?
- What patterns do you see in substitute-absence coverage? For instance, were there absences in specific classrooms, grade levels, or subject areas that were particularly difficult to fill? At what time of the year did these absences occur?
Red Rover Absence Management simplifies these reflections with comprehensive, ready-made reporting baked into the solution alongside tools to help you dig deeper into your metrics.
Ed-Tech Solutions
Speaking of solutions — it’s also worth examining your ed-tech tools that support core HR workflows. Reflect on their capabilities, costs, duration of contracts, and ease of use. Don’t forget to consider the nature of your partnerships with each vendor providing your solutions as part of this exercise.
If you’re utilizing a K12 platform, be sure to triple-check how well it stands up to the efficiency gains that these platforms often profess to create. More often than not, such claims are mere mythos.
Download and share these handy checklists to guide your team through your reflection exercises:
Revise (Or Revitalize): Prepare Your People And Processes
Once you and your team orient to wins and challenges within your HR processes, you can begin adjusting or reinvigorating them for the next school year.
First, account for any changes passed down from either your state or district that must be adapted in your organization. There may be new employee policies or additions to the handbook, for instance.
Then revise your documentation and practices for workforce management. Even in the rare event that your documentation and practices already work well, this is still your opportunity to layer in improvements or efficiencies to keep them running smoothly — to revitalize rather than revise.
Consider these improvement strategies to prepare your community for effective absence management and hiring:
- Prepare your “careers” page for open positions across your district or school. With Red Rover, this page integrates directly with the solution to streamline the entire hiring process, from posting the job description to managing applicants.
- Distribute any new employee policies that staff need to review and sign before returning to campus next year.
- Create or update guidelines for your staff about engaging with substitute teachers. Whether they are on-site for one day or one month, substitutes are valuable members of a school community and want to feel like they belong!
- Encourage building leaders and staff to revise and even modernize their “sub” binders. If you are a Red Rover district, your schools can simply update their School and Classroom Profiles — no more paper copies and three-ring binders!
- Keep substitutes excited and eager to come back to your site over the summer and into early fall. Consider organizing opportunities for quality professional development, sending thank you notes to substitutes, and looping them into important announcements as the start of the year approaches.
Reach Out: Communication, Communication!
Of course, once you’ve put together improved programs for your teams, you need to tell them what to expect during the new school year — the earlier, the better!
If you have staff vacancies, spread the word about these opportunities across multiple channels as soon as your job posting goes live. But great communication doesn’t stop there. Prioritize an excellent candidate experience by making ongoing communication during the entire process seamless.
With Red Rover Hiring, applicants can easily apply for a position on the go with the mobile-friendly solution (without needing to remember a dozen usernames and passwords). On the internal side, hiring teams experience simplified outreach baked into the applicant tracking process. Say goodbye to juggling email addresses and drafts in multiple locations!
For returning staff, prepare a communication plan for providing critical information and updates to all those policies and processes you’ve adjusted. You don’t need to wait until teams return to campus, either. Use digital tools like the bulletin feature in Red Rover to broadcast announcements to internal teams, such as reminders to fill out specific forms or review the employee handbook.
For substitute staff, especially those new to your organization, ensure they receive all training materials and resources well in advance to successfully navigate your absence coverage processes.
Whether you’re communicating with staff or substitutes, highlight how educator feedback impacted where and how you introduced changes to your organization’s protocols. Demonstrating how educators’ voices played a part in program improvements is an excellent trust-building strategy and also helps ease natural anxiety that can sometimes arise with change.
Revisit: Keep Improving And Iterating All Year Long
At this point, you’re ready for the back-to-school season and all the excitement and chaos it brings! But don’t forget — these practices will continue to support your HR processes throughout the school year. That’s why our final “R” encourages you to make plans and habits of revisiting each practice for ongoing iteration.
Here are a few examples of how Red Rover sees districts and schools continue improving their hiring and absence management strategies all year long:
- Keep the careers page and job postings up to date. Mid-year transitions do happen — so ensure you’re ready to act quickly on emergent vacancies!
- Keep the substitute pool “healthy” and engaged. Reviewing patterns behind your fill rates at least quarterly can help you get ahead of emerging gaps in absence coverage. Sometimes, both the big picture and the minutiae are needed to uncover these patterns, so take time to examine data at multiple levels of detail.
- Keep sourcing feedback from staff about absence and substitute management. Not every input may be feasible to introduce mid-year, but even small tweaks visibly made to processes and programs can greatly impact staff’s experiences.
Back-To-School Season Is Coming — Red Rover Has Your Back
As with every season before school begins, there are many tasks and opportunities to improve student learning, school climate, and staff’s experiences and skills. But not everything on the back-to-school checklist for HR administrators and principals has to be tedious, time-consuming, or rote.
From hiring to employee absence management and substitute scheduling to time tracking — Red Rover is ready to help you manage mission-critical, high-volume activities and prepare for an amazing school year. Learn more about how our solutions natively integrate into your district ecosystem to meet your dynamic needs — saving time, money, and headaches during the flurry of back-to-school!
