The Little School Districts That Could
October 24th, 2005 Comment on this articleThe Independent School Districts of Hearne, Calvert, Franklin, Mumford and Bremond, in central Texas, are less than megalopolitan. The largest is Hearne ISD, with 1,500 students. Total enrollment of all five is about 4,000. But the state-mandated chore of retaining student records is just as difficult in districts with fewer students as in big city schools-perhaps tougher, because a smaller student body usually means a rural area with less tax revenue. And less state aid.
Less revenue, but plenty of paper records, in dusty file cabinets and boxes. However, there’s an electronic solution, as the Texans have discovered: Laserfiche document management.
State education law requires that the records of every special education student-most of them physically or mentally handicapped-must be retained for seven years after the student has left the system. Most administrators like to hold on to the records even longer. The reason was demonstrated recently, after an administrator reluctantly destroyed some records, legally and properly, in full compliance with the requirements of public notice.
Two weeks later, she received a telephone call from a lawyer in Ohio. He’d been assigned to represent one of her former special-ed students, a mentally-challenged youth charged with murder. He needed those records to support a defense of mental incompetence.
“This is far from an uncommon experience,” says Dr. Van Walker, director of the Robertson County Special Services Cooperative. “Special education records are uniquely important for many participants in those programs because, as a result of their disability, many need public assistance throughout their lives, from Medicaid, SSI, or other programs. The special-ed records establish their eligibility.”
In Robertson County, there were 15 file cabinets filled with “inactive” special-ed records-records of youngsters no longer there-and floor space was running out. Laserfiche provided the solution, which involved feeding over a million sheets of paper through a high-speed scanner; converting their contents into electronic images, and processing them with optical character recognition (OCR) technology to permit full-text searching. Once those steps were taken, a few keystrokes would display any document on a PC monitor. This represents a giant step towards the paperless office.
How were such small school districts able to afford such cutting-edge technology? Walker credits both Laserfiche’s low price-point and the fact that the school districts worked together. “Instead of each school district having its own special-ed department, they share special-ed services,” Walker explains. “And my pitch, to the five superintendents who are my bosses, was: ‘We can use Laserfiche to manage the special-ed records, but, more than that, the system can be used in the future to store all student transcripts.’” Texas law requires that those transcripts be accessible forever.
Walker consulted Charles E. Beard, president of DynaSource, a state-authorized, qualified vendor of information systems—and a Laserfiche reseller. Beard designed a system that not only stores records-it has an additional benefit of creating a “work station,” allowing summer jobs and computer training for some of the special-ed youngsters participating in the state Job Training Partnership Act program.
PCs with Laserfiche software have been installed in the cooperative’s office, and this summer, four students-two special-ed and two regular-ed-will begin scanning the data in those 15 filing cabinets of inactive files into the Laserfiche system.
As the program continues, Walker says, more of the students with special needs will be employed in it. “Giving these young people good work habits, and some basic skills in modern office procedures, is an important part of this program,” he says. “It’s all about inclusion-moving them into the mainstream and helping them to become useful, productive members of society.”
“Large school districts sometimes look down on small school districts, because they assume fewer resources mean fewer services,” says DynaSource’s Beard. “What the Robertson County Special Services Co-op is proving is that a cooperative effort, in a relatively rural district of Texas, can perform superior services and be the envy of school districts everywhere.”
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Tags: Education, Local Government