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by Mary Jones
Business Editor
Recently, the district office has made significant changes in staffing and responsibilities of staff members.
These changes, brought about by the retirement of district business administrator Darin Johansen, have brought shifts to the responsibilities of existing employees, the hiring of a new data specialist, and the hiring of an accountant. These changes were made to address concerns and challenges felt by district office employees.
Tammy Jorgensen was hired to replace Johansen as business administrator at the start of the year, and as that position was being filled, other employees at the district office suggested making adjustments because of a need they felt for more support.
“As we looked at the changes in the office, we met with each employee here that is over different programs and everything, and the common thread that came out through those interviews is that we need more support. We need more help,” Hansen said. “They were just feeling more overwhelmed year by year, and they expressed that need, and through some processes of some audits and stuff like that, the board said, ‘You know what, yeah, you guys make it happen.”
In the shifting of current employees, Amanda Morley, who had been the district data specialist, was assigned new responsibilities, leading the district to hire Angela Thompson to fill Morley’s previous position.
“Amanda, [was in charge of] state reporting, dealing with PowerSchool, online registration––she did a lot of the technology part of it,” said administrative assistant Melanie Lee. “It was overwhelming for her as well … it was just getting to be too much.”
Other changes from the state also brought about more changes in the district office responsibilities.
In the past, funding was given to schools to be spent at their discretion or without extensive evidence of purchase history. Now, the money given to the schools must be managed differently and tracked more thoroughly, with spending being reported back to the state, a process that requires much more work and organization.
According to Hansen, this task has created stress for district employees and emphasized the need to hire Bryce Warby, who in the past worked in Snow College’s financial department, as an accountant.
“[The state] just keeps adding more and more and more, more detailed reports, even copies of receipts and information to back up our reports,” said NS business administrator Tammy Jorgensen. “It used to be that they’d pretty much just take our reports, but now they want detail inside those reports. That’s what’s making it so hard is the time to get to that deeper detail hasn’t been there, and we’re hoping that we can be more efficient with our time that way and be able to give the state the reports that they’ve requested.”
The time cost of reporting district spending back to the state has posed an issue for a while, but with the new organization of responsibilities and employees, some of these concerns can be addressed.
“We’ve been understaffed for some time,” Jorgensen said. “We’ve just tried to shift the responsibilities, and we’ve got great employees here that carry more than their normal load. That’s made us be able to do what we’ve done with the workforce that we’ve had, but now we’re new people, new responsibilities, it gives us new opportunities.”
The changes that have taken place at the district office were designed to relieve some of the stress being felt by employees, and according to Lee, these measures have been effective.
“Since COVID … there’s just been more responsibilities placed on our shoulders here at the district level, and we just have been buried,” Lee said. “It just has seemed like we can’t get on top of things, and so hiring another person is going to help with that. I can already tell a difference; I’m not as stressed, and I’m not here as late on some days as I used to be to get my job done.”
