Successes - Portland Public Schools
Pacific Northwest’s Largest School District Enrolls Fortis to Reduce Document Retrieval from Hours to Minutes

Organization
The Pacific Northwest's largest school district, Portland Public Schools, serves approximately 47,000 students in 85 schools. The district’s mission is to ensure that all students meet or exceed academic standards and are prepared to make productive life decisions.

Challenge
Along with a student body of this size come enormous amounts of paperwork. Portland Public Schools needed an efficient, secure way to share, archive and retrieve student documents. One of its largest departments, Special Education, is comprised of teachers, psychologists and specialists serving students with disabilities. Their administrative issues, which consist of particularly paper-intensive processes, are representative of the document management challenges other district departments face.

“Psychologists and specialists meet with students and parents for evaluations. Subsequently, records are updated and handed over to a data clerk to makes copies, sending originals to a central storage site for filing in a student’s folder,” explained Ramzi Adas, information technology manager of Imaging Services. “Anytime that a document is requested, someone contacts the central office and an employee pulls the document, makes copies, and sends it to the school.”

The Special Education department needed to streamline the process and avoid creating multiple copies of confidential documents. Portland Public Schools also recognized the potential time and cost savings to be achieved by rolling out document management in other departments in the district.

Solution
During the process of sourcing multi-function printers, the district asked vendors to submit document management proposals. They chose IKON Office Solutions, a Ricoh company, who implemented Fortis as part of the Portland Public Schools' solution. "IKON's expertise in creating effective document management solutions in educational environments was key in selecting them as our vendor partner. A critical component of our solution is the Fortis software application, which provides scalability, Web access, and integration with other applications that the district uses," said Adas. "Fortis was one of the few solutions that offered all the options we needed."

Results
By implementing Fortis in Special Education, the school district created a more streamlined process for sharing documents with psychologists and specialists. “Initially we gave data clerks access to the system to scan and retrieve documents when a psychologist requested them. Now psychologists use Fortis Web to access documents online for viewing or making changes to student documentation,” Adas said. “All printing has been eliminated and documents can be accessed instantly, on demand. We moved Special Education from working with extremely manual and time-consuming processes to a quick, simple method of operation which they love.”

Data clerks within the Special Education department collect about 25-30 different document types that include meeting notes, notes from physicians and nurses, authorization forms and a student’s Individualized Educational Plan (IEP) that’s enforced by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). NCLB ensures that all students, including those who are disadvantaged, achieve academic proficiency. Annual state and school district report cards inform parents and communities about state and school progress. IEP includes a student’s goals and performance. Teachers and psychologists meet with parents to discuss their child’s plan. IEP gets updated close to four times a year for each student. This documentation must remain confidential and secure. Fortis limits access and guarantees that no unauthorized copies are circulating.

After its implementation and success in the Special Education department, Portland Public Schools expanded its licensing to include additional departments.

Security Services and Information Technology (IT)
Like many school districts, Portland Public Schools require all prospective employees to provide fingerprints for a background check. The Security Services department uses Fortis to store all documentation related to employee background checks. IT uses Fortis to maintain all billing information related to phone and cable company services enabling the department to track usage.

Imaging Services
Imaging Services captures over 10,000 orders a year averaging nearly 2,000 documents a week between all departments. Receipts and original copies are stored in the repository enabling Imaging Services to track documents. Fortis provides online access for authorized employees to search and review orders to find out who has received or signed for them.

English as a Second Language (ESL)
With a diverse student body, the department of ESL provides support for English Language Learners and their families. ESL uses Fortis to secure and preserve documents in a student’s or parent’s native language. In addition to preserving native documents, ESL stores transcripts and birth certificates in the Fortis repository making them easily accessible.

Talented and Gifted (TAG)
Portland’s TAG department is dedicated to accommodating the unique academic, social and emotional needs of Talented and Gifted students across the districts. In compliance with the Oregon TAG Mandate for gifted education, teachers assess a student’s level, rate subject areas and modify instructions to provide appropriately challenging content and classroom pacing. Fortis secures parent letters and notification of eligibility for these students to participate in the program.

Finance
Within the last six months, the Finance department began scanning documents into Fortis. Now any documentation received from vendors and contractors, such as 1099 and federal identification forms, are secured and indexed into the Fortis repository.

Benefits
Fortis reduced the turnaround time for retrieving Special Education documentation from three to four hours to three to four minutes. In addition, Fortis increased overall productivity by 85%. Employees no longer wait to obtain documents before scheduling appointments with parents, and they no longer waste time searching for misplaced documents.

Portland Public Schools was able to downsize their storage facility’s square footage. Initially they leased a 30,000 square foot storage area which required the support of ten employees. With Fortis, they reduced the space they needed to 15,000 square feet reducing employee support to three. The district was then able to reassign seven employees to other tasks. The unused space was leased out to the county producing a minimum of $50,000 in cost savings.

State and federal statutes require Portland Public Schools to retain documents for at least 20 to 30 years. With Fortis, the district can preserve and secure student records to ensure compliance.

Next Steps
Portland Public Schools plans to incorporate Fortis into additional departments starting with its Records department and Human Resources department, which will benefit greatly from the software’s workflow capabilities. They hope to add more functionality in the Finance department by integrating Fortis with PeopleSoft, the software that manages and processes their invoices and purchase orders. The Finance department will then be able to pull up an invoice stored in Fortis without leaving their financial system. Portland Public Schools plans to integrate Kofax and Ricoh GlobalScan products with Fortis as well to expedite scanning, archiving and document sharing.

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