Successes - Walton County Public Schools
Walton County Public Schools Ensures Documents are Secure with Westbrook Fortis

Organization
Walton County Public Schools serves nearly 13,000 students in north central Georgia and consists of nine elementary, three middle and two high schools, plus one alternative school, a performance learning center, and the Walton County Career Academy. In addition to maintaining a high quality of instruction for all students, the Walton County Board of Education has an ongoing mission to integrate technology throughout the schools to improve services to students and parents.

Walton County Public Schools was named a tech-savvy school district by the Center for Digital Education and National School Boards Association for 2007. They placed ninth in the category of school districts serving from 2,501 to 15,000 students.

Challenge
As with most school systems, Walton County faces the challenge of handling an overwhelming amount of paper files and devotes many resources to the management of these files, including space and storage, filing cabinets, and labor and supplies.

Walton County knew that their system for maintaining student files was inadequate and put documents at risk for inadvertent destruction. Student files dating from the 1940s to 2000 were permanently stored in old school buildings that were deteriorating, and in some cases, lacking electricity.

If a request was made for a document, a staff member had to drive to the building, search through the files, pull the file and bring it to Walton’s Central Office for copying. Once the original was copied and the person requesting the document had the needed information, a staff member would return the document to the old school building. Not only was the process a safety concern for staff, the student records were not secure and could possibly be destroyed if the building collapsed or a natural disaster occurred.

Solution
In 2003, Walton County decided to address their document storage challenge by adopting an electronic document management solution. This solution would not only secure documents in the event of a disaster, but also provide Walton County the ability to comply with government mandates regarding student files and record retention periods.

As an educational institution, Walton County Public Schools must comply with various record-keeping regulations, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) which governs how student records are stored, retained and secured for privacy.

After evaluating various document management systems, Walton County selected Fortis software to digitize their student files, primarily because Fortis made it easy to scan, index and retrieve information. They were confident that Fortis could deal effectively with the sheer volume of documents they needed to archive.

Solutions across Walton County Public Schools
Currently, the Student Services Department and the Department of Education for Exceptional Students are using Fortis to manage student files. Student records are kept at their respective school for three to five years, and then they are transferred to the archives. Walton County will eventually have each school scan in current records or devote a full-time person in the Walton County Public Schools central office to scanning current records. Human Resources is using Fortis to manage documents related to background checks for educators and staff.

Student Services
Student Services, comprised of social workers, nurses and counselors, is responsible for taking care of the mental and physical health of students, investigating cases of abuse or neglect, and fulfilling requests for student records.

Challenge
Former students request their records when they apply for social security or for other administrative processes that require proof of age and where they were born. They also request immunization records. The state of Georgia requires school systems to keep these records indefinitely.

Solution
“We have one staff member who is dedicated to scanning all records into the Fortis database. We’re scanning in hundreds of pages each week,” says Gina Meadows, Director of Student Services. “Once we get everything indexed, we will no longer have to go to our storage facility to pull transcripts. We will be able to fulfill transcript requests quickly – and that will save a lot of time and energy.”

Department of Education for Exceptional Students
The Department of Education for Exceptional Students serves 1,650 active students with special needs in the Walton County school district. The department’s goal is to help students grow and develop into capable adults, while maintaining open communications with parents to ensure each student receives the best instruction possible.

Challenge
With a paper-intensive workload, the Department of Education for Exceptional Students processes the documentation required for each student, including each student’s Individual Education Program (IEP), initial evaluations, reevaluations, psychological assessments, hearing and vision tests, and student work samples.

A student file can contain more than 700 pages, and each file continuously grows as the student progresses through the school system. Each new school year also brings more documentation and paperwork completed by staff and parents. In addition, a student file needs to be accessed and reviewed routinely by teachers, principals, administrators, coordinators, psychologists, and in some cases, by attorneys.

Coordinating access to student files was cumbersome and prevented more than one person from accessing information at the same time. Sharing paper files also posed the inherent risk of misplacing or losing documents. For example, if an individual or an agency requested information on a student, or if the student transferred to another school, a staff member would copy the student file and then mail the package. On average, the department mailed 10 packages daily.

These time-consuming processes hindered information exchange and prevented timely service to parents and others involved in a student’s education.

Solution
Instead of maintaining a room full of files, the Department of Education for Exceptional Students scans the files each day and stores them in Fortis. Once the documents are in the Fortis database, they can be easily searched and retrieved in seconds as Fortis provides multiple querying options, including keyword searches as well as searches for specific text within a document.

Using the Fortis solution, staff can now easily access each student’s file without ever having to pull a record from a file cabinet, and they can access documents stored in Fortis from any location within the school district. Documents are now secure since only authorized users can log into Fortis to view a student’s file. In addition, multiple users can view the file at the same time. The Department of Education for Exceptional Students has archived all student records from 1981 to today. The department is required to keep the records until the student’s 25th birthday.

Instead of mailing documents and incurring the expense of copying and postage, staff can easily email the document to requestors. And of course, printing documents is possible if necessary.

“We use Fortis for archiving all of the special education legal files. We also send records to other systems when children are transferring to another school,” says Dr. Suzanne Carter, Director – Department of Education for Exceptional Students. “The Fortis solution has helped our departments to streamline operations, reduce costs and better meet their responsibilities to students, parents and regulatory agencies.”

Human Resources
Human Resources at Walton County Public Schools is responsible for the ongoing management of personnel records for teachers and staff. One particular burdensome process is the maintenance of background checks for all employees.

Challenge
Walton County Public Schools is required by law to perform background checks on all individuals applying for employment within the school district and for current staff. In a year’s time, Walton County can process 700 – 800 fingerprint and background checks. Additionally, teachers must undergo a renewal process of background checks every five years, which means Walton County can process the paperwork for 300 – 400 renewal background checks.

Staff in the Human Resources department estimate that they process 15 background and fingerprint checks in a day, and in some cases, have processed 100 of them in one week.

The cumulative effect is that the department faced a storage issue for the current documentation and knew that the department would soon be overwhelmed by paper as new personnel was recruited.

Solution
HR staff now scan each background and fingerprint check into Fortis and have eliminated the need for additional filing cabinets. Instead of locating a paper document, staff enter a search term and can easily view the file they need. Once the documentation is securely stored in Fortis, the department can destroy the paper files.

Results
While the initial Fortis implementation at Walton County Public Schools was to secure and manage inactive student files, Walton County leadership realized that a centralized, electronic repository can improve their processes and provide numerous benefits. And the Fortis solution is easy to use and maintain. “What I like about Fortis is that the product practically runs itself. I spend little time administering Fortis, and our users are happy with it,” says Tammy Hyde, software support specialist. New users require minimal training, and Hyde can spend her time productively rather than on resolving software issues.

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