July is a cherished month in the education world.  Most every educator has at least part of July off, free of most any school responsibility.  Alas, most every educator has now---or will soon---return to work for the upcoming academic year.  At this time in past years, when I was working in the trenches of school administration, frantic preparations were underway for staff training and opening of school responsibilities.  Unless you have done it, you may have a hard time conceiving of how much goes into these efforts.

One of the many responsibilities I had as an assistant principal at this time of the year was preparing for the distribution and return of opening of school forms.  I have seen this done in such a haphazard manner as to be an insult to administrative professionalism.  In the schools I worked in, no fewer than ten different forms were sent home with students the first day of school to be returned completed and signed by parents.  Typically teachers were tasked with collecting these and recording which had been returned and which remained outstanding.  It was a burdensome responsibility on top of all the other management tasks teachers have in the first couple of weeks of school.


To help, I developed a system of color coding the forms and a checklist for tallying returns.  Each of the ten forms were copied on a color-specific paper (at significant cost of money and time), counted out for each teacher, and placed in their boxes for distribution to students.  Because class counts were still changing and students would inevitably often "lose" their forms before delivering them to parents, extra copies had to be made.


Then, for several weeks, teachers had to collect what forms were returned, check them off, then hound those students who had not returned them.  We also asked them to alphabetize and collate all returned forms each day to turn into the office for reconciliation and filing.  You would be amazed how the forms would trickle in.  Besides those who turned in none whatsoever, incomplete sets or forms with missing signatures required students to be hounded to return only a few out of the entire set.  It was a huge burden of execution.

Once the forms were returned, certain ones had to be referenced throughout the year.  An example was the permission to publish student photographs.  This is an important permission form and records were often incomplete and not easily referenced when needed.  Inefficiency and out-dated processes risked unauthorized publication and a resulting headache.  The same could be said for other forms that had to be referenced or could be audited.  It was a 20th-century process operating in the 21st-century of advanced technology-assisted data management.


One of the projects I have been working with EdClick on this summer is professionalizing this process as well as so many similar data-collection and information disbursing tasks school administrators have traditionally done in costly, time-consuming, and difficult to query (search) ways.

Time and money are two incredibly pressed resources we have in education today.  Why should we still be doing so many of these tasks on paper?  Why not make these forms and other such communications/requirements available online for parents to review and sign electronically?  Doing so will save the school money, time, and mistakes in professionally managing these important communications.  Completed forms can then be easily queried for review and other tasks, such as assessing which are outstanding versus which have been accounted for.  Need to know if a student photograph can be published?  Within seconds a database query allows you to see that form or access the information in a list.  This database will serve the school in so many ways, throughout the school year.


Once the greater segment of your parent population saves the school money and time by using such a system, those who do not can be targeted in more traditional ways.  Over time, especially given an appropriate parent education campaign about the merits of participating online---or another means of compulsion---the paper tasks will shrink down to a much more manageable number of outliers.  The future is paperless.


Opening of school forms are but one of many such paper intensive tasks associated with school management EdClick has now automated and professionalized for efficient distribution, collection, and verification.  I will be highlighting others in posts over the coming weeks.

School is just about back in session.  My education-specific blog posts are too!