Final Paper: Human Resource in Education Issues / EDUC 734 / Ed.D.

/ Cohort 8 / CSUSB

Final Paper: Human Resource in Education

Issues
Prepared by Emily Ledesma, Robert Levesque,
Stephen Franklin, and Eyad Alfattal

Introduction
This paper presents a small scale qualitative study aimed at exploring
human resource (HR) issues as reported by HR education professionals who
represented three different segments of public education in California; K-12,
community colleges, and four-year universities. There was one representative
from each education segment that was interviewed by the research team using a
semi-structured interview instrument. The instrument consisted of five broad
questions that were intended to elicit freely emerging themes about current vital
issues in HR public education as seen by participants (Seidman, 2012). Interviews
lasted 60 to 90 minutes and were conducted at locations and times as per
participants convenience. Below is a table, Table 1, which illustrates the
demographics/characteristics of the participants.
Table 1
Sample Demographics/Characteristics
Education
Segment

Gende
r

Years in Education

Years of HR
Experience

Ethnicity

K-12

17

Caucasia
n

23

14

Asian

18

18

Asian

Community
College
Four-Year
University

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Final Paper: Human Resource in Education Issues / EDUC 734 / Ed.D. / Cohort 8 / CSUSB

As illustrated in Table 1 above, one participant, 33% of the sample, was a

Caucasian male; and two participants, 66% of the sample, were Asian females.
Participants had varying years of work experience in education and HR. The
sample average years of experience in education was 19.3 years, while the
average for HR experience was 11.7 years. Finally, so as to protect participants
identities, pseudonyms were used. These were Christopher for the K-12 HR
representative, Lina for the community college HR director, and Lara for the fouryear university HR manager.
Data was analyized using the theme analysis method and Ryan and
Bernards (2003) techniques for theme identification. After this introduction, this
paper presents findings from the data in three different sections each is
dedicated to one segment of education. Following these, the last section below
briefly discusses findings over all segments and provides global concluding
remarks.
The K-12 Story
Data obtained from the K-12 public school system exposed several themes
embedded within the human resource department. The main emergent themes
include: (a) effective communication, (b) time management, and (c) professional
relationships. Christopher, a human resource director for a large K-12 public
school district shared the importance of establishing and maintaining effective
communication. He stressed the importance of communication with key
stakeholders when he stated, I would recommend new employees connect with
the right people and you must work to build everyone up around you (p. 7).
Christopher illuminated the notion of effective communication, as an essential

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Final Paper: Human Resource in Education Issues / EDUC 734 / Ed.D. / Cohort 8 / CSUSB

link with key department members aiding in the development of effective

professional relationships. Such relationships, promote personnel effectiveness
and collaboration, therefore influencing employee resiliency. More importantly,
effective communication must be established within the contours of a large
school district, thus decreasing risk factors that contribute to misrepresentation
of information. Christopher supported this claim when he stated, One or two
members can be trying to speak for the whole. They may say that everyone feels
the same, but in reality it is only one or two members (p. 9). It is vital to foster
effective lines of communication with multiple personnel within the same
department, thereby allowing the obtainment of diverse views.
The K-12 public school system can be a complicated web of interchanging
systems, department and personnel. This notion is especially true for a large
public school district that must manage vast quantities of employees. The K-12
public school district included in this study employs over 80,000 individuals.
Time management is imperative for meeting the needs of organizations that
employ a significant volume of personnel. More importantly, time can be viewed
as an obstacle when dealing with collective bargaining units. Local Control
Funding Formula (LCFF) is centered upon documented growth towards
organizational goals and student outcomes. The demand for wage increases is a
consistent concern for collective bargaining units, which can only be justified
when there is documented progression towards pre-established goals.
Christopher reinforced this claim when he stated, There must be evidence of
improvement of improved services to issue and give wage increase (p. 9). The
ability to obtain essential data required for LCFF monies is met with pressure

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Final Paper: Human Resource in Education Issues / EDUC 734 / Ed.D. / Cohort 8 / CSUSB

from collective bargaining units, thereby effecting personnel within the human
resource department.
The Community College Story
Analysis of data here revealed four main themes: (a) technology, (b)
budget, (c) compliance or litigation, and (d) HR management complexity. The
Community College HR Director, Lina, who participated in the interview,
expressed a number of concerns regarding the changes in the work environment
such as the impact of technology on everyday processes and the subsequent
need for staff to constantly keep up with these changes. She also mentioned that
the lack of an adequate budget to hire the staff needed to keep up with all the
tasks associated with a multi-campus district is becoming more problematic
every day. In particular, Lind was concerned with the growing complications
associated with growing litigation which she felt requires the human resource
professional to assume a level of responsibility for which many in her profession
are not properly trained. In her estimation, this critical need for ongoing training
extends beyond those working in HR. Lina added that, [] everyone in our
district needs to be aware of their behavior (p. 3). This then led to a discussion
on performance evaluation - both in terms of its importance but also the lack of
consistency among staff conducting these evaluations and in developing and
monitoring an effective performance improvement plan.
With regards to the district where Lina served, she was also concerned
with the issue of leadership development and lack of institutional knowledge.
She was especially concerned with the number of projected retirements within
the next five to eight years and referred to this turnover as staggering.
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Final Paper: Human Resource in Education Issues / EDUC 734 / Ed.D. / Cohort 8 / CSUSB

Another issue was the ever increasing cost of healthcare. She went on to say
that, Obamacare, unfortunately, has made this issue more complicated.
Implementation of this law requires a tremendous amount of tracking by staff to
determine eligibility and rates for part-time and adjunct instructors. Additionally,
there has been no consistency in the guidance provided to implement this law.
The Four-Year Story
Data collected from the four-year university HR professional revealed that
the most prominent theme for this segment of public education is compliance.
This theme linked to virtually all HR functions, and it connected to the increasing
number of related campus/system policies, as well as state and federal
regulations that govern HR practices. For example, as Lara was providing her
testimonial on key issues that had emerged in human resources over the past
three to five years, she stated that, [] there were only few required trainings in
the past such as harassment training for supervisors. Now and in addition to
background check, we have to train on things related to Title IX and mandated
reporting (p. 9). Lara thought that the field of HR is becoming more and more
complicated when she gave the example of compliance requirements in training.
She further explained that other functions of HR are similarly becoming highly
regulated and gave other examples which were relevant to the implications of
imposing Affordable Care Act. Lara told a story where her HR department
eventually had to hire a full time HR manager whose job was mainly to follow up
with policy and regulations updates relevant to Affordable Care Act and
continually internally-audit their HR department for compliance.

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Final Paper: Human Resource in Education Issues / EDUC 734 / Ed.D. / Cohort 8 / CSUSB

Other themes that emerged from the data and were deemed important,
communicated other current key issues in HR; these were retention and use of
technology for recruitment themes. Lara reported that retention became more
challenging in times of good economy, where her employees were less worried
about adventuring into applying elsewhere and taking new employment risks.
Lara linked retention to performance evaluations and termination processes. She
explained that when retention was harder, management had to consider
undesirable impacts of negative evaluations on employees morale and
consequent prospective for retaining these employees. She explained that
evaluations were mainly related to three types of employees, temporary,
probationary, and management personnel. For these three categories,
evaluations were very important for the continuation of assignment and the
transition to permanent employment status in the situation of temporary and
probationary staff. For permanent employees, on the other hand, evaluations had
less impact relevant to termination, as well as employee motivation and morale.
As for the use of technology in recruitment, Lara thought that this has
negatively affected her ability to contribute to the applicant selection process.
She reported that in the past, a job posting would attract 50 to 60 applications,
which were relatively easy to evaluate and forward to management. Now and as
her campus posts positions through NEOGOV, a position posting would attract
about 500 or 600 applications on average. As she would not have time to screen
all these in details, she had been using minimum requirement criteria and
automated systems without being able to verify applicants information. This had
been resulting in her having to forward potentially lower quality applications to
management.

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Final Paper: Human Resource in Education Issues / EDUC 734 / Ed.D. / Cohort 8 / CSUSB

Finally, Lara thought that despite the challenges HR faces, HR departments

needed to constantly improve their services. She described how weak HR
programs have several negative implications leading to high turnover, poor
employee morale, conflict of interest, unsafe work environment, ethical and
moral dilemmas, and highly litigious environment.
Discussion and Conclusion
As shown in the data analysis in the sections above, HR is a vital though
convoluted arena within the field of education that includes the K-12, community
college, and four-year university systems. These findings support arguments
earlier advanced by Klingner, Nalbandian, and Llorens (2015). The present study
supported the findings of such earlier studies by verifying the complexities that
exist in the public educational sector. In particular, we were able to verify that
this complexity is a result of technology and the expansion of local, state, and
federal regulations. This was an overarching theme that emerged from the
analysis of data from all sectors of public education.
Though the use of technology was cited as the primary variable
complicating the HR function, it was the need to comply with an ever expanding
array of regulations that was placing an overwhelming strain upon this
department. While technology can help produce efficiencies in the performance
of certain duties such as documentation, record keeping, and communication,
technology itself presents its own unique challenges. HR professionals now have
to keep up-to-date with HR management software and reciprocal tasks associated
with the software.

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Final Paper: Human Resource in Education Issues / EDUC 734 / Ed.D. / Cohort 8 / CSUSB

Compliance with laws and regulations on the other hand is becoming a

more complicated aspect of HR in public education. Some examples of these
include the need to understand and comply with new legislation brought about by
Title IX and the Affordable Care Act both of which have added more
responsibilities and duties as well as an increase in mandatory training for
existing staff. Unfortunately, this is taking place in a work environment where
relationships between HR and employee associations are sometimes
confrontational; where budgets are limited; and HR staff are already feeling
overworked and under-appreciated.

References
Klingner, D., Nalbandian, J., & Llorens, J. J. (2015). Public personnel
management. London, UK: Routledge.
Ryan, G. W., & Bernard, H. R. (2003). Techniques to identify themes. Field
Methods, 15(1), 85-109.
Seidman, I. (2012). Interviewing as qualitative research: A guide for researchers
in education and the social sciences (4th ed.). New York, NY: Teachers
College Press

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