School districts continue trend toward paperless operations
As technology becomes more affordable and school budgets are slashed, many districts are turning to paperless classrooms that rely on document scanning as a means to both save money and better engage students. Given the amount of paper documents most schools distribute and take in on a regular basis, the idea of managing those documents electronically and ensuring nothing goes missing can be quite valuable.
To that end, more school districts are now moving in this direction, with the Aiken County Public School District in South Carolina recently moving to store human resources documents and financial information in a document management system. This is the sixth-largest school district in the Palmetto State, with some 1,500 teachers, 1,800-plus additional employees, and more than 24,000 students spread across 40 schools. It believes the move will help set up necessary workflows that boost efficiency and cut costs on an ongoing basis.
Specifically, the system will help the school district create better workflows to help it monitor who accesses documents, archive important records, and store all forms and other documents related to its thousands of employees. As a result, the district will be able to manage these crucial documents with an entirely paperless process.
A similar effort
Meanwhile, in Texas, the Amarillo Independent School District recently implemented a paperless document management system that will allow parents to register their kids for the 2017-18 school year online, according to the Amarillo Globe-News. Prior to the implementation, which was first rolled out for high school and then middle school students only, parents had to physically go to a school or other location for registration, with myriad forms in hand.
Now, even if people still want to go to schools for in-person registration – for whatever reason – they won't need to have physical copies of any forms in hand, and the process will likely go much faster.
"If someone is struggling with our form, they can come to registration and we have staff that will try to help them if they're having trouble in a certain area," AISD communications director Holly Shelton, told the newspaper.
The more schools can do to examine their options for document management and scanning, the better off they're likely to be in the long run. However, a crucial part of this process may be just how remote capture capabilities – which give employees more power to scan documents themselves regardless of their locations – will help this process.
