Teaching is Moving Online; What About K-12 School District Administration?

2020 will certainly be remembered for the coronavirus pandemic but in K-12 education, it will also be remembered as the year online learning was implemented for nearly all students in a very short period of time. Teachers are learning on the fly how to engage children in new ways and provide effective lessons across digital mediums. The shift to online learning garners the headlines because it impacts more of the countries’ population but what impact has the work-from-home mandates had on K-12 school district administration?

“The rules are being re-written almost daily” is the response I have heard from clients working in Human Resources and Finance departments. They aren’t sure when they will have to report to the office and what work, if any, will be available for them to do when they get there. Skeleton crews are working odd hours and most offices are shut down completely with employees working from home. IT departments are scrambling to find laptops for everyone required to work remotely and dealing with related security challenges. The common concern running through my conversations with these clients is the requirement to be in the office in order to do their job.

As a 20-year veteran of the document management industry and someone who has helped many K-12 school districts go paperless, I understand these concerns and the reasons behind them. Many districts will not be able to access paper-based files or keep paper-intensive processes from collapsing while all employees are working remotely. I am hearing these concerns and we are still in the very early stages of what could be an extended shut-down. The majority of K-12 school districts still run most mission-critical processes on paper; everything from enrollment to payroll processing to AP check creation requires paper to transfer from one desk to another. Is this reliance on paper creating a condition where administrative employees have to come in close contact with each other?

Even districts committed to scanning may have huge paper “choke-points” in their processes where paper is received prior to scanning. If your district’s processes still rely on paper at any point (think documents being hand-delivered or coming in through the mail) your district needs to rethink the process. Can documents be emailed or captured from a smart device and electronically be uploaded to the district? How can I stop the paper before it reaches the district? This allows a truly paperless environment in which employees can perform their jobs from anywhere! It also greatly reduces the risks associated with paper-based processes, such as loss or destruction, even when there isn’t a pandemic event.

While employees are working from home your district has a unique opportunity to identify where paper is holding you back. If you recognize that, in your district, someone will have to go to the office, mailbox, department headquarters, a campus or other location because there is no way to perform a process without this happening, you have likely identified a place for process improvement. And the greater the urgency, the higher the likelihood for improvement!

The United States will recover from the coronavirus pandemic but until we do, we have opportunities (and perhaps more time on our hands) to identify where we want our districts to improve and how we want our roles to be more efficient and effective. I don’t know the impact of having 90% of the countries’ children educated from home will have on the K-12 industry’s future, but I do believe this pause is a chance for the industry to rethink ways in which we work. It may be that we embrace the fact that most of this work doesn’t have to happen only while we are at the office!