As you know, we are assigning Central Office team members to support in our schools during the severe staffing shortage caused by the recent COVID surge.
If you haven’t already, review the list of assignments to understand where and when your team members (and yourself) will be supporting. Please reach out to the assigned members of your team to make sure they are aware of their assignment and to see if they have any questions. We’ve also put together a comprehensive FAQ that should help you and your team understand and feel prepared for the work ahead.
As a reminder, if a member of your team cannot make their assignment due to circumstances like illness or planned time off, please ask them to reach out to the school leader, in addition to alerting you, to let them know. If possible, see if another member of your team is available to support in their absence.
As we share in the FAQ, it will be up to you as a manager and your supervisors to prioritize what work and projects team members will need to adjust or put on hold while they are supporting in schools. It’s not up to an individual employee alone to find ways to manage their workload. Please work with your executive director and SLT member to prioritize and keep the most critical work moving forward.
We also know that not every employee will be happy with their assignment. Please know that we took employee preferences into account as much as possible while still ensuring that we were meeting the needs of our schools. Should one of your team members have concerns about their assignment, we appreciate your support in helping them make their assignment work. If an assignment is too much of a hardship for an individual, team members are encouraged to work with their peers to find alternative solutions (i.e. swapping days or schools, swapping with someone who does not currently have an assignment, etc.). Please do the best you can to make swaps with those who have similar licensure, classroom experience and second-language skills to best support that assignment. Email any changes in assignments to central_officesupport@dpsk12.org so we can log the changes and notify principals accordingly.
Additionally, review this information about providing extra-duty pay to those supporting in schools:
- Your employee will enter their time worked as "extra duty" pay into TruePay. You will be responsible for approving just as you normally do.
- Overtime is allowed when there are times that your team member is not able to pause their work and will need to work more than 40 hours. The maximum-allowed overtime would be 8 hours, to support the one day of work.
- Overtime will hit your budget; however, we will have records in our system to show that the overtime pay was to support the Central Office support in schools. Financial Partners are aware of this and will support you with any concerns.
Please reach out to your supervisor if you have any questions. Thank you for your support and leadership as we all continue to put Students First and manage through these difficult times together.
