A small Pennsylvania district trades a complicated legacy system for an Absence Management and PDM solution that works the way it should.
About Homer-Center School District
Tucked into the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania, Homer-Center School District serves roughly 800 students across a single campus with one elementary school and one Jr/Sr high school. Its motto, “Where everybody is somebody,” captures a close-knit culture where about 65 teachers and 100 staff rely on a small administrative team to keep the day-to-day running smoothly.
That same close-knit culture is exactly why the district’s previous absence management system felt like a poor fit. Every extra click and every extra step added up fast. Two years after switching to Red Rover, Homer-Center has consolidated both Absence Management and Professional Development Management (PDM) into one platform and hasn’t looked back.
From Complicated to Streamlined: The Continued Growth With Red Rover
Homer-Center’s previous absence management solution wasn’t simple. Reports were difficult to pull, substitute onboarding required entering the same person in five different places building by building, and system pricing kept climbing – to name a few.
Mandy Succheralli, assistant to the business manager and the district’s daily Red Rover administrator, is candid about being “not a computer guru”. So, simplicity wasn’t just a desire, it was a deciding factor.
From first look to implementation and full switch, the reality of what simple could do was more than within reach. “Whenever we got the introduction, it seemed so much more simplified,” she said. “And the cost versus the old provider was substantially lower. Easier and less expensive; they were both positives for us.” In her first training, Mandy remembers thinking, “Wow, is that all we have to do?”
When the district later went looking for a better way to track Pennsylvania’s Act 48 continuing education hours and manage professional development, the decision was easy. Erin Collins, secretary to the superintendent and the person responsible for substitutes and PD entry, heard about Red Rover’s PDM module during a monthly customer Huddle. Having the ability to consolidate both functions into one familiar platform quickly sealed the district’s decision.
“I really like working with Red Rover and how easy it is,” Erin said. “If I have any questions, I always get an answer quickly.”
Homer-Center partnered with Red Rover in the early stages of Professional Development Management’s product release. Together, Red Rover and the team of Erin and Mandy were able to build out and setup a PDM system that would serve the exact needs of the district and their admin staff. The need and desire for certain features and functionality were easily integrated into ongoing product development that bolstered the system even more.
For Mandy, the moment of truth for the new system was the year-end rollover into a new school year. “I was a little nervous,” she admitted. “The rollover went seamlessly. It was very easy.”
A Tough State Integration Solved
The PDM implementation did come with a different challenge for the team: integrating with PERMS, the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s state portal that tracks teacher continuing education. The PERMS system presented several obstacles within the integration buildout, but the Red Rover engineering team pushed through and owned the process from start to finish for the Homer-Center team.
“Red Rover has been great. They’ve been on it, and they took care of the whole integration with PERMS. I know it was a difficult process, but they just kept at it and got it all figured out. I can’t be happier with that.” — Erin Collins, Homer-Center School District
Red Rover’s successful integration setup and process with PERMS fully enables Homer-Center, and districts across Pennsylvania, in a simplified approach and process for PD. Today, Erin enters professional development hours from teacher certificates and in-service sign-in sheets directly into Red Rover, and the system automatically sends them to PERMS on the district’s behalf – no extra data entries, no hangups, and no back and forth.
The Features of Red Rover That Have Become Daily Lifesavers
A handful of Red Rover features have quietly become part of how Homer-Center runs each day.
Live chat support has replaced what used to be days, weeks and sometimes even months of unanswered support tickets experienced with prior vendors. A live agent is always there right within the Red Rover system, responds in seconds, looks up the issue, and either fixes it or walks the user through it on the spot. “That is one of my favorite things about Red Rover, because I can just ask and it’s answered,” Mandy said.
The impersonate feature has turned out to be one of the district’s most used troubleshooting tools. It lets administrators view the platform exactly as a specific employee or substitute sees it. When a teacher calls confused about something on their screen, the team can quickly see what they see and easily answer or fix it right then and there instead of having to guess or spend more time to resolve.
Customizable reporting has eliminated a category of work the district used to dread. When the superintendent needs a quick rundown, like remaining sick and personal days for support staff, the right report is already there, with columns that can be added or removed in a click. “Something that would have probably really stressed me out was simplified with the click of a button,” Mandy said.
A unified platform ties it all together. Red Rover’s Absence Management and PDM share a single login and are built within one, single system, so toggling between recording an absence and entering a teacher’s continuing education hours takes one click and one entry. “It’s all in one place. It’s so self-explanatory,” Erin said.
The Move to Texting, a Faster Way to Onboard Subs, and the Difference Red Rover is Making
Like many districts that switched to Red Rover, Homer-Center moved away from traditional automated phone calls in favor of text-message notifications. While a few tenured, older substitutes initially asked whether they’d still get phone calls, any concern on how the change might affect day-to-day sub placement became nonexistent. The transition was even smoother than expected with Red Rover’s modern and easy-to-use system.
“As soon as the teacher’s putting in a day, it seems to get filled right away.”
— Erin Collins, Homer-Center School District
However, substitute onboarding is where real contrast from the old system is most dramatic.
“Substitutes were probably one of our biggest hassles in our old solution. There were about five different places that you had to go and make sure they were entered,” Mandy recalled.
With Red Rover, every piece of substitute information lives in a single, streamlined screen. Erin’s favorite onboarding tool is the “invite later” feature, which lets her enter a new substitute’s information ahead of time and schedule the system invitation for the day after the school board approves them.
“The day after a board meeting is very hectic. Now they get entered right then in the morning because I was able to set it up that way through the invite later feature,” she said.
Real Time Savings, From Payroll to Problem-Solving
The return on investment goes beyond just simplifying daily workforce operations for Homer-Center, the real return shows up in two distinct places. The first is payroll: the district’s payroll administrator now pulls a substitute report directly from Red Rover for each pay period and uses it to issue payments, which has eliminated paper timesheets completely. The district has also been able to customize its setup for distinct leave types, such as “sick family” versus “sick personal,” to track absences with more nuance. The clarity matters in a small community: if a coach takes a sick family day for a child but is well enough to attend an evening game, the leave codes tell the right story.
The second distinct return is one Mandy hadn’t expected: time spent troubleshooting. “I had several emails or phone calls trying to figure out why something was wrong in the past,” she said. “Now it seems that things get solved very quickly, either immediately or within hours. The chat feature and the customer service has definitely saved me time.”
Red Rover’s modern, intuitive system and innate flexibility for how things actually work in a school or district, paired with the highest level of real, human customer service and support, has helped to transform how Erin and Mandy’s district HR team operates, more than doubling operational efficiency and freeing up valuable team and focus toward higher-impact work.
An Added Bonus: A Partner That Keeps Showing Up
As if Homer-Center hadn’t already gained enough from their switch to Red Rover for Absence Management and PDM, both Mandy and Erin also point to Red Rover’s monthly customer Huddles as one of the most unexpectedly valuable parts of the ongoing relationship.
“I have been very pleasantly surprised at each huddle. There are constantly new things that have been added each time and how it’s [Red Rover’s platform] always being made better,” Mandy said.
Erin agrees: “You just feel like your input is being heard by Red Rover.”
Two years in, the district has filled teacher absences faster, simplified substitute onboarding, eliminated paper timesheets, consolidated Absence Management and Professional Development Management into a single platform, completed a tough state integration for required teacher certification tracking, and reclaimed administrative time. For a small Pennsylvania district where every staff member wears multiple hats, simpler isn’t a luxury. It’s the whole point.
