Human Resources Interview Paper

In order to explore the challenges of human resources in the public sector, I chose to look into the human resources department of Wylie ISD. I arranged to interview Melissa Hefty, the Educator Quality Coordinator on October 21, 2015. From the answers given to me, the main challenges in Human Resources, as it applies to school districts, center on the immense amount of paper work involved, staffing and maintaining personnel, and resource limitation within the department. To begin the interview, I looked for an explanation into what the Human Resources Department actually did. To this end, I discovered that Human Resources department at WISD resembles what might come out of a textbook. The team is responsible for tasks such as teacher hiring

We spoke at length about what attributes would be attractive to WISD as an employer. To this end, she heavily emphasized the importance of character for teachers. WISD has an initiative known as the “Wylie Way”, started by Superintendent Dr. David Vinson. The district is looking to build well rounded students, and teachers who embody that well roundedness. While we were on the subject of Wylie ISD’s teachers, I commented on the rise of average experience and advanced degrees. Mrs. Hefty attributed this to the lack of turnover, higher value placed on experience, and partnerships with local universities. The rise in quality at WISD has led to teachers wanting to stay where they are. Experience has always been valued at WISD, and increased pay is always an incentive to acquire an advanced degree. Furthermore, many local universities have programs that are almost entirely online. Thus teachers can work and simultaneously complete the requirements for

I brought up the topic of the district’s superior STAAR scores in relation to the rest of the state. In this regard, she attributed this trend to the new focus on improving test scores and graduation among students. Thirteen learning specialists focus on collaboration, coaching teachers, and helping with curriculum. Thus, teachers know how to better shape their classes to help their students pass these tests. From here, we moved on to the challenges that WISD has been forced to face in the past couple of years. One of the challenges was the influx in enrollment throughout the district. WISD has built new schools and campuses, and as such makes enormous amounts of new hires, and continually have to hire teachers. Some of these new hires come from sources such as universities and the Region 10 ESC. Student teachers who show their value are offered jobs to continue on in the district, and the Region 10 ESC alerts the department to prospective candidates. Another aspect of this challenge is that the student teacher ratio needs to stay low to achieve the targets the district has