Get to Know Your TASPA Board

12 | HR Connection

Get To Know Your TASPA Board

DR. TAMEY WILLIAMS-HILL TASPA DISTRICT III REPRESENTATIVE

Dr. Tamey Williams-Hill has served as a secondary teacher, campus administrator, and central office administrator for the past 18 years. Most recently she has reconnected with the AISD team as the Project Director and Equity and Inclusion Specialist for the Office of Equity. As an LMSW, Dr. Williams-Hill always viewed and practiced teaching and educational leadership through the lens of equity. She serves as a guest lecturer for two local universities on the topics of human resources, teacher rights and responsibilities, and doctoral research methodologies. Dr. Williams-Hill has presented at local, state, national, and international education conferences; serves on several civic, education, and corporate Board of Directors as both a member and chairperson. She volunteers with community service groups that awards grants to classroom teachers and scholarships to students. ADVICE TO THOSE NEW TO HR: Understand who you are as an individual and how that influences the goals your department sets and the decisions you have to make in your new role. Understanding how your beliefs and department and district goals align are important to the success of the role you plan within your organization. The current challenges situated around how school organizations respond to education during the pandemic have a direct impact on human resource departments in regards to staffing, budgeting, employee wellbeing, and managing the evolving changes in local, state, and national processes, policy, and law. As human resource departments are required to become nimbler during this time, taking an equitable approach to decision making allow for a comprehensive approach to taking care of the organization for caring for personnel. With the understanding that making equitable decisions takes time, our department adapted the five principles from USC CUE’s Five Principles for Creating Equity by Design to guide HR staff through the decision-making process: Principle 1: Clarity in language, goals, and measures. As HR staff makes decisions regarding personnel, remember to identify the purpose of the action, the goal to be attained, its impact on student learning, and how to communicate with employees about the action. Principle 2: Adopt language that focuses on the action and systems, not the employees. Be timely with the message and consistent with the language; do not use language that inadvertently targets groups of employees who hold a particular position or work in a certain geographical area of the district. Principle 3: Equitable practices and policies are designed to accommodate differences in the contexts of employees’ positions within the district—not to treat all employees and positions the same. Accommodate the differences in the organization’s historically marginalized employee groups: non-exempt; Black, Latino/a, and female.

DR. TYRONE SYLVESTER TASPA DISTRICT II REPRESENTATIVE

Dr. Tyrone Sylvester completed a Bachelors of Music from Stephen F. Austin State University, Masters of Education from Prairie View A&M University, and a Doctorate in Organizational Leadership from Grand Canyon University. “I’ve been very blessed in my professional career to have worked with some of the greatest educators and human resource professionals in the state of Texas. My career started as a band director in Beaumont ISD in 1994. I served eleven years in Alief ISD; four as an assistant principal and seven as the campus principal of O’Donnell Middle School. In 2008, I was afforded an amazing opportunity to serve Spring ISD as a director of human resources and in 2015, moved to Goose Creek CISD to serve the Baytown and Highlands school communities as a director of human resources. To establish myself as a credible human resource professional in the strategic and policy-making aspects of human resource management, I obtained the following credentials for human resources: • SPHR issued by the Human Resource Certification Institute (HRCI) • SHRM-SCP issued by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) • pHCLE issued by Battelle for Kids and the American Association of School Personnel Administrators (AASPA) I consider it an honor to serve on the TASPA Executive Board as the District II Representative.” CHALLENGES & ADVICE

K-12 human resource professionals are currently facing a myriad of challenges as they seek to meet the human capital needs of their respective school organizations. The challenges confronting school organizations include but are not limited to the following: • Teacher Recruitment and Retention • Support for New Teachers • Families First Coronavirus Response Act • Americans with Disabilities Act • Family Medical Leave Act • Virtual Instruction vs. Face-to-Face Instruction • Shortage of Substitutes • COVID Testing • Number of Employees Absent per the District’s COVID Protocol • The Other Non-COVID-19 Related Challenges: Title IX, Teacher Incentive Allotment, Science of Teaching Reading, and certification changes Addressing these various challenges associated with COVID-19 and new initiatives that are impacting human resource practices have stretched our skillsets as HR practitioners. It is unthinkable to attempt to meet the fluid human capital needs of our school organizations without the support of our human resource networks such as TASPA, our local TASPA-affiliated organizations, and region service centers. The opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue with human resource colleagues about these current challenges and the human resource action plans being implemented to support our school districts in these unprecedented times are absolutely invaluable. The role of the human resource professional is critical to the success of school organizations as we are tasked with the responsibility of creating a path forward that will enable our organizations to support and protect our workforce while continuing to meet the instructional demands and expectations of our school communities and government entities. This COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be a transformational crisis for school organizations as we have lost our ability to do business as usual. We are now forced to think out of the box and become increasingly innovative in our approach to establishing and implementing human resource practices and policies that will meet the unique needs of our school communities. I strongly encourage each of our human resource colleagues to connect with your state and local human resource network and use the wealth of knowledge and experience within those networks to assist you in successfully navigating these uncharted waters of COVID-19 and K-12 initiatives.