It’s true that DataCentral is the go-to option for districts that want to do salary comparison reports. But HR administrators should know by now that it offers much more than just salary information.
The online database—an add-on subscription option available to TASB HR Services members—also provides data on the HR policies, practices, and benefits through our HR Surveys. There are currently nine different survey topics online with more soon to come.
DataCentral can help districts answer critical budget questions. Are you wondering if your district pays too much for employee health insurance? DataCentral can tell you how much other districts in your region are paying. If you’re looking to trim leave benefits, you might want to know the typical number and type of local leave days provided by other districts, information DataCentral can provide. Are your substitute costs too high? DataCentral can show you how your teacher absence rate stacks up against other districts. And if you’re concerned about staffing in the HR Department, you can look to DataCentral to find out how other districts staff HR and what responsibilities are typically assigned to the HR Department.
The key to access all this and more is simply your participation. To run a comparison report including similar districts or to download the data to your own spreadsheets, you must participate in one of the surveys first. Most of the surveys are quick and easy and list the information you must have at hand in order to complete them. As participation in these surveys grows over time, a more robust and meaningful database of key HR metrics will be at your fingertips whenever you need it. Two new surveys will be released this spring: teacher substitute practices and employment contract practices.
The Human Resources Department in Irving ISD produces an annual report for the board, superintendent, and executive team that includes data on the state of the district’s workforce, performance metrics for the department, and how HR contributes to the mission and goals of the district in quantitative terms. Neil Dugger, assistant superintendent for Human Resources (also a member of the TASB Advisory Committee on DataCentral), uses the HR Surveys feature to supplement the annual report with external benchmarking data. Dugger selects data from districts with 10,000 or more students and compares average practices against Irving ISD for employee benefits, teacher turnover and attendance rates, and roles and responsibilities of the human resource department.
If your district has DataCentral, we invite you to log-in and click on HR Surveys on the top menu to see the surveys available. For those who aren’t subscribers yet, TASB’s Web site 
includes more information on the benefits of DataCentral.
