If you've struggled to onboard itinerant staff properly, you're facing a structural challenge, not a failure of HR. Most onboarding systems simply weren't designed for employees who work across multiple locations.
School psychologists serving five buildings. Speech-language pathologists splitting time across the district. Occupational therapists driving between schools to serve students on IEPs. School nurses covering three campuses on rotating schedules.
These professionals represent some of the most critical support roles in education. Yet their onboarding experience is almost universally fragmented—welcomed somewhere, but belonging nowhere. When they aren't effectively onboarded, the consequences ripple through student services for years.
This article outlines an onboarding framework that actually fits their reality. Let’s start with understanding their unique challenges first so that we can then move to solve for them.
Standard onboarding assumes employees work in one building, report to one supervisor, and build relationships with colleagues they see daily. These assumptions work fine for classroom teachers and building-level staff. For therapists, nurses, and other specialists who split their time across multiple locations, every assumption breaks down.
Traditional onboarding assigns employees to a location where they'll complete orientation, meet colleagues, and establish belonging. Itinerant therapists and nurses might technically be "based" somewhere but that assignment is often arbitrary and doesn't reflect their actual work reality. If a school psychologist spends two days per week at the middle school and three days at elementary feeders, what would you consider their homebase?
Every school has different entry procedures, parking arrangements, visitor policies, and communication norms. A speech-language pathologist serving four schools needs to learn four different sign-in systems, four sets of expectations for hallway transitions, and four approaches to parent communication. These cultures may conflict with each other; what's expected at one building might be discouraged at another.
Itinerant staff often have complex reporting structures. A school nurse covering three campuses might receive conflicting directives from three different principals, with no clear hierarchy for resolving disagreements. Who's responsible for their onboarding, their evaluation, their professional development?
A classroom teacher can walk down the hall to ask a question or process a difficult interaction with a colleague who understands the context. An occupational therapist might have no colleagues in their field at any of their assigned buildings; the nearest OT may be three schools away.
The result?
Therapists, nurses, and itinerant specialists start their roles without clear ownership of their onboarding, without consistent access to peers in their discipline, and without full integration into any single building's culture.
These professionals often report feeling like permanent "visitors" rather than staff members, even years into their roles. That sense of not-quite-belonging starts on Day 1, and inadequate onboarding reinforces it.
The goal is straightforward: therapists, nurses, and itinerant specialists should finish onboarding feeling prepared to work effectively across all their assigned locations, connected to peers in their discipline, and clear on who supervises them and how.
Achieving this means moving beyond building-centric onboarding to a model that addresses professional identity, multi-site logistics, technical role requirements, and belonging—four dimensions that require intentional design.
Before therapists, nurses, and itinerant specialists set foot in any building, they need a strong foundation in their professional role at the district level. This central orientation creates a professional home base even when the physical home base is ambiguous.
Here is how correct onboarding can ensure these employees start their multi-site work with clear grounding in how their role connects to the broader organization:
Provide district-wide context so itinerant staff understand student demographics, strategic priorities, and how their role contributes to district goals beyond any single building.
Introduce the professional community early by connecting new hires with others in similar roles, such as the school psychology team, the speech therapy department, the nursing staff, etc. before they disperse to isolated assignments.
Establish the supervisor relationship clearly with dedicated time for instructional supervisors to clarify expectations, review caseloads, and explain the evaluation process.
Verify systems access across all locations to confirm employees can access student information systems, email, scheduling tools, and specialized platforms from any building they serve.
Complete all compliance requirements centrally so required training, background verification, and documentation are handled once rather than repeated building-by-building.
Here's where most districts fail: they orient itinerant staff to one school and assume the rest will figure itself out. It won't. Here is what it takes to actually integrate someone into multiple school communities:
Assign a location contact at each building so the new hires know exactly who to approach with questions when they're on-site.
Cover logistics specific to each school including parking arrangements, building entry procedures, workspace or storage access, equipment availability, and mailbox location.
Review safety procedures for every building because emergency plans, crisis protocols, and communication systems vary from school to school.
Establish schedule coordination processes so itinerant staff know how to communicate their availability to building administrators and teaching staff.
Provide student services context including key students they'll serve at each location and relevant IEP or service delivery information they need before beginning work.
Explain cultural norms unique to each building such as meeting expectations, communication preferences, and staff dynamics that affect how work gets done.
Therapists, nurses, and itinerant specialists have technical onboarding needs that go far beyond standard orientation. This training often falls in a twilight zone—between central HR and building administration—and neither fully owns it.
Someone must, or critical knowledge gaps would persist throughout the employee's tenure. Here are a few role-specific trainings you should consider.
For school psychologists:
Learn crisis response protocols and on-call procedures that may vary by building or feeder pattern.
Locate assessment materials and understand inventory management across multiple locations.
Master evaluation documentation systems and state reporting requirements.
Understand how to coordinate with multi-disciplinary teams at each building.
For speech-language pathologists and occupational therapists:
Identify where therapy materials and equipment are stored at each assigned location.
Access IEP software and progress monitoring tools with appropriate permissions.
Understand Medicaid billing procedures where applicable to the district.
Clarify supervision and professional development requirements for licensure.
Learn scheduling systems for managing individual and group sessions across buildings.
For school nurses:
Review health office procedures specific to each building's setup and staffing.
Understand medication administration protocols and storage locations at each site.
Access student health plans while maintaining confidentiality requirements.
Coordinate emergency medical response with building administrators and local EMS.
Master health record documentation systems used across the district.
For social workers and counselors:
Map referral pathways that may differ by building, feeder pattern, or student population.
Build community resource connections relevant to each school's geographic area.
Review mandatory reporting procedures and district-specific protocols.
Learn case documentation requirements and confidentiality standards.
Understand crisis intervention procedures and how they coordinate across sites.
An Aberdeen Group research found that 86% of new hires decide how long they'll stay within their first six months.
For therapists, nurses, and itinerant specialists, those six months are spent in professional isolation unless someone intentionally creates connection.
Belonging doesn't happen accidentally when your new hire’s work is fragmented across multiple locations. You need deliberate strategies:
Onboard similar roles in cohorts rather than individually, bringing all new student services staff together so a new school psychologist meets peers from day 1.
Assign mentors from the same role by pairing new SLPs with experienced SLPs who understand the realities of itinerant work.
Create regular professional community touchpoints through monthly meetings of itinerant staff in similar roles, providing peer support and collaborative problem-solving.
Increase supervisor check-in frequency because itinerant staff need more contact with their instructional supervisor to compensate for the daily support they miss by not being attached to one school.
Make recognition visible across all locations so when an itinerant PT does exceptional work, the acknowledgment reaches every location they serve, not just the one where it happened.
The right technology makes these four pillars easy to implement.
HR Cloud's Onboard platform gives itinerant staff a single, mobile-accessible hub for completing all district-level requirements, creating the professional home base that multi-site employees otherwise lack.
Workflow automation generates building-specific onboarding sequences for each assigned location, ensuring no site gets skipped because someone assumed orientation happened elsewhere. Role-specific pathways deliver technical training tailored to school psychologists, therapists, nurses, and counselors without requiring HR to manually track who needs what.
And Workmates creates connection across fragmentation—peer recognition that reaches every building, communication channels organized by role rather than location, and engagement tools that help itinerant staff feel like members of a professional community rather than permanent visitors.
Itinerant staff often trigger compliance questions that building-based employees don't. Background check coverage is a common point of confusion. Do clearances obtained for one building apply district-wide? In most cases yes, but state requirements vary, and documentation must explicitly reflect multi-site assignments.
Similarly, some mandated training applies universally while other requirements, like building-specific safety procedures, may need completion at each location.
Access and logistics create additional compliance layers. If buildings use different entry systems, itinerant staff need credentials for all assigned locations before they're expected to work there. When personal vehicle use between buildings is expected, districts should verify appropriate insurance documentation and clarify any mileage reimbursement procedures during onboarding rather than leaving employees to figure it out months later.
For non-exempt itinerant staff, hours tracking adds complexity. Employees may need to log time by location for cost allocation, grant reporting, or labor compliance purposes. Ensure your time tracking systems accommodate multi-site work rather than forcing employees into workarounds that create audit risk.
HR Cloud centralizes compliance tracking for itinerant staff so nothing falls through the cracks. The Onboard platform documents multi-site assignments and tracks completion of both district-wide and building-specific requirements in one place, giving HR visibility into who has completed what, and where.
For hours tracking, Time Clock allows location-based logging, providing accurate records for cost allocation and labor compliance without adding administrative burden to already-stretched itinerant employees.
When evaluating or configuring your onboarding tech stack or platform, look for capabilities that match multi-site realities rather than forcing workarounds. The right platform treats itinerant assignments as a standard use case, not an edge case requiring manual intervention.
Central completion tracking — One view of all requirements regardless of which building they're assigned
Multi-location workflow support — Ability to assign building-specific tasks at multiple sites
Mobile access — Completion from any location without requiring building-specific equipment
Manager visibility across locations — Supervisors see progress for all their itinerant reports
Credential management — Documentation that travels with the employee to every building
HR Cloud's platform was built for distributed workforces, making it particularly well-suited for the multi-site realities of itinerant education professionals.
The centralized dashboard gives supervisors visibility into onboarding progress across all assigned locations, eliminating the need to check multiple systems or chase updates from individual buildings. Workflow automation triggers location-specific task sequences for each site assignment, so a school psychologist added to a new building automatically receives the relevant orientation requirements.
A mobile-first design means therapists, nurses, and specialists complete onboarding tasks between appointments, from their cars, or wherever they happen to be, without needing access to building-specific computers or networks.
You don't need to overhaul your entire onboarding process to start improving outcomes for itinerant staff. These four steps will surface the gaps and clarify where to focus first.
1. Identify your itinerant roles. List every position that serves multiple buildings. You may be surprised how many exist.
2. Audit one recent itinerant hire's experience. What building orientations did they receive? How were they introduced to each location? Who served as mentor?
3. Clarify onboarding ownership. For each itinerant category, determine who owns central orientation, building orientations, role-specific technical training, and belonging-building.
4. Connect with your itinerant staff. Ask them directly: What did you need during onboarding that you didn't get? Where do you still feel disconnected?
Typically the instructional supervisor (special education director, student services coordinator, etc.) owns central and technical onboarding, while school principals own site-specific orientation.
An itinerant employee needs one orientation at every building they'll regularly serve. So a speech therapist serving four schools needs four building orientations. Remember that this is essential, not optional.
You need deliberate strategies to create a sense of belonging for staff who serve across multiple locations. Some of these strategies include:
Onboard in cohorts with others in similar roles.
Create regular professional community touchpoints
Assign mentors from the same discipline who understand the realities of multi-site work.
Ensure recognition reaches all their assigned locations, not just the one where it happened.
Traditional mentor matching pairs new hires with experienced staff at their assigned building. But that approach fails itinerant employees whose challenges are role-specific rather than location-specific. So match new itinerant staff with mentors from the same professional discipline: a new school psychologist with an experienced school psychologist, a new SLP with a veteran SLP. These mentors understand the realities of multi-site work and can provide the guidance your new hires need.
Where possible, yes—at least occasionally at each assigned building. Attending staff meetings builds relationships with classroom teachers, keeps itinerant staff informed about building priorities affecting their students, and reinforces that they're part of the school community rather than visiting outsiders.
Spreadsheets and building-level tracking systems fall apart when one employee has requirements at four different locations. Use a centralized onboarding platform such as HR Cloud that provides single-view tracking, showing exactly what's been completed, what's outstanding, and where gaps exist. At each location where they are supposed to be onboarded.