Successes - Indian River State College
Westbrook Fortis Allows Indian River College to Manage Over a Million Records and Meet FERPA Compliance

Indian River State College (IRSC), in Fort Pierce, Florida, with 12,000 full-time students, is a leader in the use of technology in education. In fact, IRSC received a national #1 ranking among medium-sized community colleges from the Center for Digital Education and the American Association of Community Colleges for their use of technology, for teaching and learning and administrative support functions.

Indian River is typical of a two-year community college, in serving a large, dispersed and diverse student population. Their students in many cases are contending with a range of educational and economic challenges. Indian River serves four-counties, with four branch campuses, in a seventy mile radius.

Challenge
As a technology innovator, IRSC saw the need to move to an integrated document management solution to address challenges with student records and paper and business processes throughout their organization. IRSC selected Fortis from Westbrook Technologies as a replacement for their prior-generation image capture software, and found themselves with a powerful tool that they put to use in multiple functional areas of the institution.

Working with MTS Software Solutions, IRSC has applied the Fortis document management system to several departmental areas, including major applications for student records, accounts payable, the office of the president and financial aid. For IRSC, Fortis is a second generation solution for imaging and document storage, archiving, and retrieval, replacing an older Minolta imaging system.

Student Records
The institution serves a student body that, due to necessity, interrupts and resumes its education several times, sometimes with gaps as large as ten years or more. Some students, who are combining work with study, take years to complete their curriculum requirements. In this environment, Indian River needed a solution that would allow them to retain, manage and archive all student records – including all correspondence and files – indefinitely. In particular, the ability to quickly find a student’s old records and both respond to the student’s request for information as well as offer the ability to retrieve and re-activate a record when a student re-enrolls at the institution.

Accounts Payable
Also challenging to IRSC, with its multiple campuses, was the effective management of the accounts payable process, where the accounting staff was attempting to respond to an increasing volume of information requests from managers at offsite campus locations.

Regulatory Context
The federal FERPA legislation places important responsibilities on the institution’s management of student information. In particular, FERPA requires the institution to maintain the strict privacy of student records and ensure that the use of student educational records fall within strict usage and redaction guidelines. The state public records act (FERPA) requires the institution to retain and make available to the public all official information, such as Board of Trustees meeting minutes and other official business.

Solution
The Fortis document management system is used at IRSC for all phases of document handling, from capture through retention through archiving. In a distributed campus setting, the Fortis implementation is designed to improve business processes involving access to, retrieval of and archiving of records.

The initial application of Fortis and Indian River’s biggest application is in the student records area. IRSC has a policy of retaining all student records indefinitely. All new records are now converted to electronic format, including transcripts, admissions and registration data, and other student reports. The repository enforces a security regimen consistent with FERPA. With regards to the backlog of old paper records, current IRSC policy is to add old records into the electronic system when a student re-enrolls at IRSC.

Staff fielding requests for student records can now use the Fortis indexing and full text retrieval tools to quickly access records. The records in question can then be communicated to appropriate inquiries by email, or through hard copy output. Email is the most popular transmittal method.

A second major application of Fortis is in the accounts payable function. Invoices and invoice approvals are stored in Fortis so that account and payable inquiries can be handled quickly over the phone or by email transmittal of documentation.

“High volume” users for both the student records information and accounts payables are given direct access to the Fortis application, with view-only privileges, providing additional efficiency and responsiveness while still maintaining the integrity and security of the records.

A third application, providing compliance with FERPA regulations, is the capture and management of all board minutes and related official documents for the Office of the President. These board minutes packages are typically 300 or more pages in length each, and the online repository provides significant savings in transmittal of these packages to the Trustees, as well as providing powerful search capabilities to find documents pertaining to a specific issue.

The overall implementation at IRSC currently involves over one million images managed online, with three scanners and a fiche reader used to capture new images.

Results
Fortis has proved to be a valuable and popular solution to the explosion of paper throughout education. Currently over one million documents reside in the Fortis system, with hundreds added on a daily basis. The largest benefit to IRSC has been speed and efficiency in servicing internal and external customers. Requests for both student records information and payables information can now be handled immediately, in seconds, saving minutes per request in search time and printing and transmittal costs. This results in an increase in servicing speeds and ready access to student information.

Another benefit to IRSC is the ability to fully comply with FERPA through holding student records within a system that imposes a clear and auditable security policy. The use of Fortis in the Office of the President has also provided an ability to easily and fully comply with the Florida FERPA public records regulations.

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