Scanning Paper Records When You’re Short Staffed

Running a Special Education department using paper records is a challenge. Identifying, classifying, prioritizing, storing, securing, archiving, preserving, retrieving, and tracking records requires a significant amount of manual labor. The decision to scan paper records into a document management system to create a more efficient, easy to use system makes a lot of sense. However, scanning and converting these records is a major undertaking, especially when you’re short staffed.

At Roseville Community Schools, a 5,000 student school district in suburban Detroit, the amount of paper documents had proliferated and had inundated the department.

Tammy Hurt is the Administrative Assistant in the Special Education department. She and her supervisor, Jeanne Peterson, deal with report-intensive documents among Special Education students in the district. Each student file includes many lengthy reports. The size of the files can run into the hundreds of pages. The district had Special Education files distributed across 93 file cabinet drawers and 20 banker boxes stacked on top of the file cabinets. Not unusual for a school district their size.

Because of the labor intensity of filing and searching for paper files across all these file cabinets, Tammy and Jeanne wanted to regain control over their domain.

First, they wanted to get rid of all accumulated paper files for past and present students by scanning paper records and converting them into electronic files. Next, they wanted a means of storing future reports for their Special Ed students electronically.

Lacking staff, the department could not scan all the documents themselves. They needed someone from the outside to do the work. Teaming up with our partner, Superior Document Systems LLC, CEO Image Systems helped the Roseville school district achieve their goals.

Superior Document Systems picked up the paper files in the cabinets, scanned all documents, and added department selected indices to the documents and folders. CEO Image Systems then imported the scanned documents and index information into our Image Executive system at the district.

The net result? All 93 drawers and 20 large boxes are gone and all Special Ed documents are now available electronically.

With the district’s legacy documents safely stored within the CEO Image Executive document management system, staff members can simply add new documents by scanning them into the Image Executive system without even leaving their desks.

Previously, users would scan at a multi-function copier and email scanned pages to their workstations. Just like at any other busy school, scanning had to fit between copy jobs and inbound faxes at the main copier. With the CEO Image Executive system and the attached scanners, staff members can now scan at any time, not just when the copier is idle.

By storing student records electronically, staff productivity has increased significantly. Instead of searching through 27 metal cabinets and 20 cardboard boxes for documents, a staff member can now find documents within seconds, at the click of a mouse.

When others request copies of Special Ed documents, a user now can find and fax the document without going to the fax machine. Before it was necessary to locate the document, remove the staples, fax it, re-staple the document and then refile it; a very time consuming task.

With the CEO Image Executive system in place, the department can easily set up access to contractual Special Ed workers to search, view and print stored documents. These other staff members will only be able to view (and not change) documents. This protects the files from being accidentally misfiled, altered, or deleted. Also, when staff and contract workers view and print files, the documents are not removed from the electronic file (as paper is from a paper file). The benefit: the documents cannot be misplaced and no time is wasted looking for misplaced or lost documents.

With the insight of Jeanne and Tammy and the services of Superior Document Services, the Roseville school district now has full control over their Special Ed student records.