Mission CISD’s HR Department has a simple goal, one that many school HR administrators around the state share: to get off the never-ending paper trail.
A paperless HR office would have some pretty distinct advantages: No more filing cabinets full of records, no more wasted paper, less work hours spent updating and purging and refiling. It’s an enviable goal. But getting there, as anyone who works in a school HR department knows, is a long, uphill battle.
Not so long, though, if you focus on one thing at a time, and not so far uphill if you have the staff that can help you make the switch one process at a time. Mission CISD has taken baby steps up the hill, automating the processes it employs for travel requests, paying staff for supplemental duties, and contract renewals. This spring it takes a more significant step as it moves to a paperless contract system developed by a computer programmer who works for the district.
“With our paperless contracts, we’re taking one step toward eventually putting in an electronic personnel record,” said Elizabeth Garza, Mission CISD’s assistant superintendent for HR/Student Services.
Garza notes that the HR office’s long-term clerical staff will have the greatest adjustment to make. Not only will they be learning how to use a new system, but they’ll lose the sense of comfort and permanence they have with paper files.
A few years ago, the district asked computer programmer Fernando Cornejo to develop a program to automate the contract renewal and recommendation process. Rebecca Morrison, Mission CISD’s director of Human Resources, wanted to take the guesswork out of contract renewals. “We know when our teachers are recommended to the board for certain contracts, we have the correct contract for them and are complying with board policy,” Morrison said.
With that program in place, Morrison’s next goal was to “go as paperless as possible” on professional contracts. With approximately 1,500 staff members on contract, Morrison wanted to get away from having HR staff individually prepare, review, and bundle contracts for all of them.
She talked to Cornejo about her goal and he came up with an idea that set the process in motion: using signature pads that had already been installed on each campus to allow employees to sign their contracts. All that was left to do was write the computer program needed to make the process work.
When Morrison came to the district in 2004, it had a strong technology program for the educational side of its operations. On the business side, the district had the resources available but wasn’t taking advantage of them.
The HR Department gradually began to look at its operations to see what it could change to become more efficient. That led to the automated contract renewal system and an online job application system.
Around the same time, the district automated its supplemental pay process using signature pads. The system allows the district to pay teachers who do extra work (such as tutoring during off hours) by sending their pay requests through an electronic approval pathway that starts at the campus level, goes to the central office, and gets a final review by the district’s payroll supervisor.
The paperless contract system it launches this spring is the most ambitious effort to date. It works like this:
From an HR management standpoint, the process should be much faster and much more transparent. Central office personnel will know at all times how far along the process is: they’ll be able to tell at a glance which employees have signed their contracts. They’ll also know immediately when employees check the “Do not accept” option so they can follow up with them.
Morrison is confident that the new system will work well even though it’s new. She’ll have a better handle on its success in the very near future because the district is currently in the process of walking principals and campus clerical staff through the paperless process. Contracts go to the board for approval on March 10.
Morrison talked to a few software vendors about the district’s needs before deciding it would be best to develop the program to automate paperless contracts in house. “This is just one of the things you can do without a commercial product,” Morrison said. Especially districts that have programmers who will do what it takes to make a program work the way their district wants it to work. Cornejo is one of those guys.
It took Cornejo a couple of weeks to write the program. He was able to complete it quickly because he had already written some code for the signature pad for other applications that he was able to reuse. Not only was he able to finish the job faster, the district didn’t get charged a second time for code that was already written, as it would have with an outside vendor.
The only hurdle in the programming process was making the signature pad work as planned. He said the outside vendor that sold the district the pads provided the technical assistance that the district needed to make the pads work. Even more impressive, it provided the help free of charge.
The district was able to put the system in place on a shoestring budget. It's major expense was the software needed to do the project (two programs for a total of $300). The rest of the technology was already in place: a database server, a web server, and the electronic signature pads for each campus (the cost varies but they generally run around $200 each). Cornejo works for many different areas, not just HR, so his time in developing the program is part of the district’s overall payroll expense.
The big advantage to Mission CISD’s do-it-yourself system is the customization. “We can model the program any way we want to without being bound to a software vendor’s constraints,” Cornejo said. “Sometimes their system cannot accommodate individual requests. With our program, anything is possible. We may make changes for next year based on the feedback we get.” And if the district does decide to change something, it won’t get a bill in the mail.
Morrison wants other HR administrators to know that setting up a paperless contract system is not out of the realm of possibility in spite of what their own programmer might tell them. She is so adamant about wanting to help other districts get started that she included the code Cornejo used to make the signature pads work in her handouts for a presentation at the Texas Association of School Personnel Administrators’ Winter Conference. “We wanted to show other districts what we’re doing so they know that it can be done,” Morrison said. “We even provided a cheat sheet…that way we can help other districts along and provide the impetus to get started.”
Districts that consider moving to a paperless contract system have a few things to consider before they get started, according to Morrison. First, do they have a programmer who can work on the project? Second, does the programmer have access to the data system that HR uses and is that data system up to date? And last but definitely not least, do they have the technology—especially at the campus level—to support this type of change?
“Honestly, the ability to go to paperless contracts has a lot to do with a district’s comfort level with technology and its desire to push the envelope and do what you can do to improve your office,” Morrison said.
