With 650,000 students taught by 29,000 teachers in 600 schools, the Los Angeles Unified School District is the second largest in the United States. And its enrollment is growing like a healthy teenager.

“We’ve even run out of places to put file cabinets,” said Rene Gonzalez, director of psychological services, who’s responsible for archives covering millions of present and former students, dating back to 1920. The oldest records were preserved on microfiche years ago, but around 1984, the old microfiche equipment gave out. Replacing the obsolete machines and repairs to those not quite so old seemed a big investment in antique technology. “We solved our problem by doing nothing, for 10 years,” said Gonzalez.

“We just kept hard copies of all our data. Right now, we have three large rooms, former classrooms in what used to be a junior high building, filled with four-drawer filing cabinets – 150 to 200 to a room. I don’t think we have space for another one.”

Gonzalez was named to his present post two years ago, and, he said, record storage was one of his first challenges. “Would we put in more rooms to store more file cabinets? That didn’t seem to me like a really practical way to solve the problem. And I didn’t see microfiche as a future kind of tool either. There’s still a storage problem with that because you’re still storing film, you’re basically creating a smaller file, which you still have to go to and look for,” said Gonzalez. “So we opted for Laserfiche. One of the advantages that we saw with Laserfiche is that you’re doing two things – one, you’re indexing the information and two, you’re storing it in a portable, compact, secure kind of a vehicle.”

The compactness of the Laserfiche system also was important to Gonzalez. Once scanned into the system, data is stored on a CD-ROM. One disk, can hold as much data as a four-drawer file cabinet. “Once we’ve emptied all those file cabinets, I think we’ll renovate this building and open it as a school again,” said Gonzalez.

“We have looked at some other types of equipment, especially an optical disk which was much more expensive,” said Gonzalez. “But it didn’t seem to have the flexibility and compatibility with all computers that Laserfiche has. Laserfiche is expandable; it has the capability of faxing, e-mailing, and networking information. That was a real selling point for us.”

“The other selling point was that the software interface is user friendly. There is a very small learning curve. We could teach people who aren’t that familiar with computers very easily how to use it. It has a Windows interface so it’s very familiar to a lot of people. That was a real plus.”

Tags: Education, school district

Posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2001 at 3:59 pm under Customer Stories, Education. You can comment on this post.