Making School Happen

While most people might picture buses, crowded hallways, and teachers working in bustling classrooms, the behind-the-scenes work is just as vital. All the work that goes into making school happen: recruiting and hiring teachers, custodians, coaches, bus drivers, food service employees, nurses, and everyone else who makes it possible to open school each day. Onboarding those employees, and providing ongoing professional learning opportunities. Ensuring substitutes are in classrooms. Making sure supplies are ordered. Running payroll. Scheduling bus routes.

Part of operating an organization as complex as a school district is ensuring that the right information gets to the right people, so they can work efficiently and make the best decisions. That requires technology, getting departments to work together, and quite often, managing change.

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Russell Miller, Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources for Andover Public Schools in Kansas, about his district’s efforts to implement new processes and software systems to be more effective and work across departments more easily. We cover:

• The biggest blockers to efficiency and effectiveness in school administration
• How they brought their software systems together to move away from paper and make information more readily accessible
• How systems thinking helps his team hire and onboard more effectively
• How to get buy-in from other stakeholders to make a change
• What’s needed to effectively implement a new software system
• The impact all of this has on serving students and staff

Related Resources:

• Change Management in K-12: What You Need to Know
• Change Management in K-12: Six Change Management Models