There's a myth that follows small districts around: modern HCM software is built for the big guys. If you've got a handful of buildings and a two-person HR team, surely you're better off sticking with spreadsheets, paper time cards, and whatever system you inherited years ago.
Albany Area School District in Minnesota and Elizabethtown Independent Schools in Kentucky would tell you otherwise.
The problem with disconnected systems
Before Red Rover, Albany Area School District, which has 320 employees, five schools and about 1,700 students, was running separate systems for time cards, time off and hiring, and none of them talked to each other. Supervisors approved vacation requests without knowing whether an employee had the hours banked. "We didn't know if someone took eight hours of vacation, if they only worked 32 hours, without going and doing math by hand," said Craig Waldvogel, Albany's director of operations, who also oversees the district's HR systems.
Accrual balances lived in a separate system that supervisors couldn't even access, so there was no easy way for anyone, staff or administrators, to see what time off was available before it was requested. "We also wanted to have a system that had our accruals built up, our banks, in it as well, because that was in another system, and supervisors didn't have access to it," Waldvogel said.
Without that visibility, employees could end up taking more vacation, sick or personal time than they'd accrued, and no one, including the employee, knew it until payroll caught it after the fact.
Elizabethtown's team was living a similar reality, just with paper instead of mismatched software. Their payroll administrator described spending two to three hours on every payroll day just making sure the hours were right. Time cards were handwritten, then chased down for signatures one by one.
What changes once the workflows connect
Both districts point to the same shift: once absence, time and hiring live in one place, the manual reconciliation disappears. Waldvogel describes it as having "a single pane of glass for systems," instead of stitching data together by hand across three logins. At Elizabethtown, an absence entered in Red Rover now flows straight into the employee's timesheet. "So, I'm not running around, hey, you weren't here this day, but you said you were," their payroll administrator said. "Things like that have just really saved so much time."
For Albany, that same visibility solved the accrual problem. With time off, tracked time and balances all in one system, supervisors and employees alike could see exactly what was available before a request went in. Once that was in place, Albany saw a drop in unplanned, unpaid absences and, alongside it, more consistent classroom coverage.
The same connection shows up in hiring and onboarding. Albany used to keep 36 paper forms per new hire in a filing cabinet. Now those forms live digitally in the employee's record the moment they're signed. "We don't have to print anything," Waldvogel said. "It's just saved digitally in their records folder."
Designed to be easy to use
Ease of use comes up constantly in both districts, and not as a passing compliment. At Elizabethtown, the paperwork wasn't the only thing that changed. Their HR and onboarding lead said new-hire appointments used to take about an hour from start to finish. With most of the paperwork already done online before the new hire arrives, that appointment now goes toward the parts a system can't handle, like printing an ID badge, instead of the new hire sitting there filling out forms at what's usually their first stop in the building.
Waldvogel put it plainly when asked what he'd tell another small district considering a switch: "Red Rover makes it so easy to implement different modules and have those tools to make your job and your staff's job easier and more efficient. It's a one-stop shop. We don't have to teach staff to sign into multiple different systems. The data doesn't have to flow between systems."
Small teams, real capacity
Neither district runs a large HR department. Albany's HR function is Waldvogel and one other person. Elizabethtown's team wears the same kind of multiple hats common at smaller districts, with payroll, onboarding and records often handled by the same one or two people. What both districts describe is a system that gives their team the same visibility and control a much bigger district would have, without asking that team to grow just to get it.
The bottom line
A district with 1,700 students and a two-person HR team has just as much to gain from an HR system that’s purposely built for K-12 as a much larger district, arguably more, since there's no extra staff sitting around to absorb hours of manual reconciliation. As Waldvogel put it: "I would say, do it. I really would."
Curious what that could look like for your district? Book a demo to see how Absence Management, Time Tracking, Hiring and Records work together, even for a team your size.
