Meet the people behind the Red Rover K-12 HR & Payroll Leadership Forum, and the thinking that led them there.
Every big idea starts with someone noticing a gap that everyone else has learned to work around. For K-12 HR and payroll leaders, that gap has been obvious for years. There has never been a space built specifically for them.
Enterprise HR conferences don't speak the language of teacher contracts, classified pay scales, or the chaos of a leave request that touches FMLA, state leave law, and a collective bargaining agreement all at once. Payroll conferences rarely have anyone in the room who understands why HR and payroll in a school district have to be practically joined at the hip to get anything done. K-12 HR and payroll leaders have been borrowing frameworks that were never built for them and making it work anyway, because that's what this profession does.
That's the gap the Red Rover K-12 HR & Payroll Leadership Forum was built to close. And it didn't happen by accident.
It starts with a shift in how we came to understand workforce management in a school district.
For a long time, workforce management has been filed under administration. Filling a vacant classroom by 6:45 a.m. Approving a timesheet. Catching a credential before it lapses. Reconciling absence time so the paycheck comes out right the first time. All of it treated as the plumbing of a district, the work you only notice when something breaks.
The more time we spent inside district operations, the clearer it became that the framing had it backwards. Every one of those supposedly administrative transactions is really a decision with consequences. A fill rate is a measure of instructional continuity. A timesheet is a budget document. A leave case is a legal position. A credential that lapses is a classroom out of compliance. And a substitute who doesn't get paid correctly is a substitute who doesn't come back next month, which lands right back on the fill rate.
Workforce management, in other words, is one of the most strategic levers the HR office holds. It shapes staffing stability, spending, compliance exposure, and retention, often before those problems ever reach a cabinet meeting. Yet it lives at the exact seam where HR and payroll meet, and that seam is where districts lose the most ground.
In most districts, HR owns the people, the business office owns the money, and the two operate on separate systems, separate calendars, and separate vocabularies. The employee lifecycle pays no attention to that boundary. One leave request touches both offices. One position change touches both offices. One data entry error in August quietly becomes a payroll correction in October and a grievance in January. HR and payroll leaders spend an enormous amount of energy reconciling work that was never designed to be split in the first place.
That's the understanding the Forum grew out of. If workforce management is strategic work, then the leaders who own it deserve a room where it gets treated that way. A room where the conversation starts past the basics, where HR and payroll sit at the same table instead of comparing notes after the fact, and where the goal is to move the profession forward rather than survive another cycle.
Jim O'Halloran is the reason this Forum exists at all. Jim has spent more than two decades in K-12 sales with deep roots in HR software, joining Red Rover in 2020, and he's spent that time listening to districts describe the same structural problem in a hundred different ways. His conviction was simple and overdue. Give K-12 HR and payroll professionals a forum built around their reality instead of a borrowed one. That conviction laid the groundwork for the inaugural event taking place this November.
To bring it to life, Jim turned to two people who live this work every day from opposite ends of the same table.
Jennifer Duvall, the Forum's Co-Director of HR, spent over 20 years inside K-12 HR operations at Corvallis School District in Oregon before joining Red Rover as a Principal Advisor. She has sat in the exact seat this Forum is built for, sorting through leave law questions, staffing gaps, and the daily friction between HR and the business office. She brings that practitioner's eye to every session she helps shape, and a low tolerance for agenda items that sound good but wouldn't survive a Monday morning.
Rob Tibbs, Co-Director of Payroll, rounds out the leadership team. Rob started his career on the district side in K-12 payroll and finance, then spent nearly a decade as a K-12 industry consultant and enterprise sales leader guiding districts nationwide through workforce management strategy. He has seen how the same district problem looks completely different depending on which office is describing it.
Together, Jennifer and Rob represent the two halves of the employee lifecycle that so often operate in silos, and they've built the Forum's agenda around actually closing that gap rather than just naming it.
What Jim, Jennifer, and Rob are building together goes well beyond a one-day event. It's a recognition that HR and payroll leaders are the hidden engine keeping schools running, and that engine deserves its own space to compare notes, solve real problems, and stop reinventing the wheel district by district.
The Forum brings together HR professionals, payroll administrators, finance leaders, and business officials for peer-led panels and working sessions on the challenges that actually keep this profession up at night. Aligning HR and payroll operations. Modernizing payroll processes. Navigating leave and absence management complexity. Building the workforce planning visibility districts need to stop reacting and start anticipating.
None of it is theoretical. Every session is shaped by people who have done this work, with speakers joining from districts throughout the nation to share what they've learned firsthand, because the best ideas in this space rarely come from a slide deck. They come from someone in the room saying, "we tried that, here's what actually happened."
The Red Rover K-12 HR & Payroll Leadership Forum takes place virtually on November 17. It's free, and it's the only event built exclusively for the leaders holding HR and payroll together in K-12 education.
If you've ever felt like you were solving the same problems in isolation, this is the room where that stops. Register today and come meet the people, and the peers, who get it.