Washoe County School District will start the school year on Monday, Aug. 14, in a very different position than one year ago. Last year was when the district was short hundreds of employees and unable to provide daily transportation to students.
WCSD’s Kristina Mason told the board of trustees Tuesday she expects the district to have a fraction of last year’s vacancies by the start of school.
“Right now, we have about 148 site-based postings that are still open, many of them in various stages of [the hiring] process,” Mason said. “We are looking at between 50 and 60 vacancies potentially – that’s it – to start the school year.”
Buses will be running all routes as well. The district last year also did not have enough bus drivers to cover all routes.
“The fact that we will not have to use our hub rotation system [for transportation], I know that that pained the trustees. It pained me that we were not able to provide daily transportation,” Superintendent Susan Enfield said. “The headline is we are in much better shape than we were a year ago, and we know that we can continue to do better, and we will.”
Mason said part of reducing vacancies could be credited to changes in the human resources department following an assessment through the Urban Schools Human Capital Academy. The review, conducted from February through April of this year, resulted in 41 recommendations for improvement or changes, 12 of which were for critical needs.
The takeaways from the effort, she said, were that the department wasn’t as efficient or effective as it wanted to be and that it wasn’t very “data rich.”
“We utilize a [HR data management] system right now that is extremely limited. In addition, it does not speak very well to our back-end business systems,” Mason said. “We’re doing a lot of hand tallying. We spend hours and hours and hours of checking and double checking spreadsheets.”
Mason said other changes are underway to improve district human resources functions, including reshaping recruitment and retention efforts and working more closely with internal teams.
“When I tell you we wake up together, and we’re the last team that we talk to before we go to bed at night, I am very serious,” Mason added. “But we do it with joy because we know it’s going to make the difference for kids to start the school year with a teacher that is there to help them grow and learn.”
Trustee Adam Mayberry asked which positions were often hardest to fill. Mason said special education teachers are always a challenge locally and nationally.
“When I talk to my colleagues across the country…we’re all having the same conversations about that scarcity,” Mason said.
She said administrative and executive assistants have also had a higher turnover rate, mainly because of salary, she said. She said high school math and science teachers are also a “hot commodity because everybody wants them.”
The district is still filling positions for the coming school year, specifically in nutrition services and housekeeping. A complete list of open jobs is online: https://www.washoeschools.net/domain/257.
