Laserfiche Smoothes School Lunch Program Lumps
October 24th, 2005 Comment on this articleSuppose your school district was composed of 101 schools, reaching 54,000 youngsters, pre-K to 12th grade.
And of those students, 35,000, give or take X, are eligible for free or low-cost lunches under a state-and- federally-subsidized nutrition program for low-income youth.
(Suppose also, that nobody can be sure whether X represents an insignificant few kids or an army.)
You’d be up against something like what Dr. Nadine Mann faced, as assistant director of the Child Nutrition Program in the East Baton Rouge Parish School System in Louisiana. Hers is a head-counting job worthy of SuperMom—or Laserfiche.
Thanks to federal and Louisiana state subsidies, lunch is free to some children from low-income Baton Rouge families and offered at a reduced price to others from slightly more comfortable homes. Federal and state auditors drop in several times a year, to make sure that all participants are really eligible and nobody’s being overlooked. But there were worse problems than being double-teamed by auditors.
One was how to register for the program. Until this year, applications were submitted singly, one per child. If there were five children in a family, five separate applications had to be submitted, providing five opportunities to put the wrong name or ID number on the wrong line. This year, Dr. Mann instituted a multi-child application, one per family. She argued that if one child’s family circumstances entitle him/her to a free lunch, siblings probably deserve the same.
Then, of course, the lunch youngsters had to be registered as regular students, the same as their classmates. This student registration is handled manually on a two-part NCR form, at the school level, with school clerks sending one part to a main frame computer at district headquarters. The other half is bound and kept at the school.
The new multi-child meal application caused some confusion to parents. There were many mistakes, which had to be found at the school, manually corrected there, then corrected again on the headquarters computer, then re-re-corrected in the meal benefits office. Dr. Mann said, “There was a lot of fine tuning to be done. My staff needed a way to search for and look at the students’ meal benefits applications, and search the mainframe data to make sure that benefits were assigned to the right student. And that’s where Laserfiche came in.”
At a meeting of the Association of School Business Officials (ASBO) in San Antonio, Tex., Dr. Mann met Chuck Beard, president of DynaSource LLC, of Beaumont, Tex., document management consultants and resellers of data processing, software, and hardware. His team created a new interface for the Child Nutrition Program that integrated the scanned image of the meal benefits application, the text file created by the OCR program and the school system’s mainframe data file, allowing a search of a student’s records in 24 fields.
“The powerful search and retrieval feature in Laserfiche enabled a search in three systems to assist in reconciling duplications, contradictions and omissions,” said Dr. Mann. The system also compares the data extracted from the meal program applications with what’s in the school system’s mainframe computer and provides an always-ready archive which puts all the following data literally at an operator’s fingertips:
Number of youngsters in the lunch program at a given school, or all schools together; children’s names; grades, dates of birth, addresses, mother’s name and family income.
“Laserfiche,” Dr Mann said, “will be an integral part of a systems approach to handling a multi-child meal benefits application in a large school system. It will provide the archival and retrieval function to the current scanning process and meal benefits processing of multi-child applications in the EBRPS Child Nutrition Program.
“But I really foresee some very good things, It is going to help me tremendously when we’re audited or we have a review from our state education department. They’ll come in and say `We need to see all the applications for Riveroaks Elementary School. “I can just type in a request for all the applications for that school, and it will print those for me, and another copy for the auditor. The retrieval process will make my life very easy.”