Please Ensure Your Scretarial Staff Responds to Heartland Data Request

Heartland has for many years maintained a database of area schools’ staff information. This system is an important part of our services to our districts. It provides the primary method for contacting school staff, including mail or van labels for packages, sending emails to set up meetings or notifying your staff of upcoming events, trainings, accreditation visits, or studies for the DE and many other purposes. As you can imagine, maintaining this system has been a huge task. We have struggled with keeping it accurate and up-to-date. There has been a lag between changes in the schools and the information being sent to us to update the information in our database.

So, we have created PeopleBox. Its web interface allows secure access for directly updating your staff records in our database. We’ve made it quick, easy and painless to use, while providing sufficient detail to help us keep your staff informed. The week of January 19th we will be sending an email to each building secretary, asking them to log into PeopleBox to verify or update the information we have on file for their building.

Our goal is to have all of school staff on file, not just teachers and administrators but also counselors, bus drivers, cooks, nurses, other secretaries, special education associates and any other staff members. Most staff should be on file already, and we are just requesting that you ask your secretarial staff to respond to our request in a timely manner.

The week of February 16th we will be sending an email to each District Superintendent’s secretary with a request that they identify staff who have special assignments or perform special functions such as At Risk Coordinator or Iowa Core District Contact. Heartland will not spam your staff with unnecessary emails, or send more than one of the same email to the same staff person as may have inadvertently been done in the past.

PeopleBox, provides a smart interface so that Heartland staff can contact your staff only in appropriate ways and only when necessary. We hope to have our building staff records up to date by February 16, 2009 and the district special assignment information entered by March 6, 2009. We hope you can help us meet this goal by urging your secretarial staff to help. Staff changes and special assignments can be updated any time as they occur going forward.