Your school’s team handles all sorts of administrative challenges. On an average day, front office staff might answer calls from parents about early dismissal, print and distribute flyers for an upcoming school festival, and spend time chasing down emergency contact forms that never made it back from students’ backpacks. None of these tasks is difficult on its own, but together they pull your staff away from the student-oriented work that inspired them to work in education in the first place.

Reducing the administrative burden on your school’s staff takes repetitive, manual work off team members’ plates, enabling them to spend more time building connections with students, families, and the larger community in your area. Not only does streamlining operations allow your staff to focus on meaningful work, but it also helps improve employee engagement and retention at your school. In this guide, we’ll cover five practical ways to lighten your team’s manual workload and free up valuable time.

1. Centralize extracurricular opportunities with a digital flyerboard.

When every afterschool tutoring center, youth sports league, and summer camp in your area submits flyers to your school, team members have to sort through them, approve them, print copies, and distribute them to students. To manage time more effectively and make it easier for parents to access these materials, Peachjar recommends implementing a digital flyerboard where families can browse and search for activities.

Where a manual workflow requires your school’s staff to handle organization, approval, and distribution, a digital solution alleviates most of this workload. Rather than bringing a physical flyer to your office, community organizations can submit PDFs through an online flyer distribution platform. From there, your school district can then approve and distribute flyers alongside other district-wide communications. That way, parents can find extracurricular opportunities through a trusted channel without extra manual effort from your school’s team.

2. Allow parents to manage routine updates themselves.

Your staff may be used to constant calls and emails about changes to parents’ information. A change in phone number or custody arrangement might require someone on your team to update records by hand. To save your team time and reduce the risk of error from manual entry, consider letting parents handle these updates through an online portal. This way, parents can make updates as necessary without needing to call the school.

Simplify updates with an online portal that enables parents to input the following information:

• Contact information updates. After a job change or move, parents should be able to update their information without calling your team or submitting a handwritten form.
• Dismissal instructions. A self-service portal allows parents to modify their pickup and dismissal privileges as changes arise.
• Emergency contacts and safety information. When a parent has an update that pertains to their child’s safety in an emergency, they should be able to reach your school right away. Look for a portal that allows parents to add emergency contact numbers and allergy information, so your school has the information it needs without having to chase down critical details in an emergency.

While updating records seems like a simple task, each revision requires staff members to step away from other important duties. Easing your team’s administrative burden through a self-service portal can give them more time for focused, higher-impact work, which can impact engagement and job satisfaction over time.

3. Coordinate volunteers through a shared sign-up system.

The more tedious aspects of volunteer coordination often land on your school’s team: seeing who’s available, assigning them to shifts, and following up with each person. A shared sign-up system lets parents and community volunteers see your school’s needs and claim slots themselves, bypassing the need for a staff member to coordinate everything via phone calls and email chains.

Reducing your team’s administrative workload allows staff members to focus on what makes engaging your school community rewarding. Instead of copying and pasting confirmation emails, a team member might have more time to respond to an interested volunteer who wants to know which of your school’s opportunities is the best fit for their interests and skill set, or to draft a thoughtful email thanking parents for their assistance with a particular school event.

4. Simplify scheduling for shared spaces.

Your school’s staff may be used to managing gym, cafeteria, and meeting room reservations through phone calls, emails, or even conversations in the hallway. To take the back-and-forth of scheduling off your team members’ plates, let teachers and outside partners book their time directly through a digital calendar.

A shared online schedule can improve your team’s operations through:

• Clearer visibility into space availability. With a shared calendar, a teacher organizing a field day or a community organization planning an assembly can check available times on their own rather than emailing your school’s staff to ask, reducing interruptions to your team members’ focused work.
• Fewer double-bookings. Your school’s staff spends valuable time following up to tell interested parties that a room is already booked. A shared calendar reduces this administrative burden and ensures that bookings don’t accidentally overlap.
• Less time spent mediating conflicts. Less scheduling overlap means fewer disputes over room reservations. When everyone can see when rooms are booked, scheduling disagreements are more likely to be resolved on their own, requiring less mediation from your team.

Removing the administrative burden of managing bookings through something as simple as a calendar encourages teachers and outside groups to work together to resolve scheduling issues and contributes to a positive workplace culture in which staff spend less time and energy on logistics and more on the student-focused work that brought them to your school.

5. Send alerts to every family at once.

If your school does not yet have a centralized notification system in place, unexpected early dismissals and weather events can cause undue stress. These unforeseen events might have your staff members attempting to reach every family through individual phone calls or emails with limited time, which creates additional administrative effort for them and makes it easier for messages to slip through the cracks.

To take this pressure off your team, move alerts to a single, centralized system. That way, a staff member can send one notification and rest assured that it reached everyone instead of hoping parents see updates before the school day ends. Having a reliable channel for alerts also helps your school build trust with families, which can make your staff’s interactions with parents and guardians easier and more fruitful.

From digital flyerboards to centralized alerts, each of these approaches has the same goal: handing off a repetitive task to a system built to handle it, so your team can spend more time on the work that needs their attention most. To reduce the administrative burden on your school’s staff, begin by pinpointing a recurring manual task and look for a digital solution that can handle the busywork for them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tara Premo

Tara Premo is an Account Executive at Peachjar, working with program providers on the East Coast and in the Midwest. Tara has expertise in driving revenue growth and building lasting client partnerships while being dedicated to providing exceptional service and creating win-win solutions for program providers. Based in Texas and loves spending time outdoors with her husband and son, playing sports, fishing, boating, and any other adventures.