Enhancing Your Student Information System with Intelligent Information Management

School districts are undergoing a transformative shift, investing heavily in records management, primarily through student information systems, the market for which is expected to grow by 12.4% between 2019 and 2029. These systems help manage the day-to-day documents produced in the classroom, but for cumulative records such as grade reports, health records for individual student needs, and supplemental records that ensure students are receiving proper accommodations, student information systems cannot provide necessary protections such as FERPA and HIPAA compliance.

These systems also cannot provide convenient access to these records in the event of audits, student or parent access requests, or legal discovery and have no way to digitize the swaths of documents from years past that your school district must maintain. 

Intelligent information management solves these challenges, enhancing your student information system with much-needed functionality. To find out more, read on and download our expert guide for document management and automation in K-12 education.

How Intelligent Information Management Compliments Your SIS

Intelligent information management systems for k-12 education can archive, index, and organize these documents for the long term to ensure FERPA and HIPAA compliance while providing convenient accessibility. They can also provide vital document capture capabilities that lift information from your district’s paper documents and allow you to leverage that data in its digital form.

Furthermore, these systems can automate time-consuming administrative tasks that take staff time away from student-focused activities core to your institution.

Managing Records Outside Your SIS

While student information systems help significantly with document management in K-12 schools, several record types can benefit highly from an integrated approach that includes enterprise content management. These record types include:

Cumulative Records

Portfolios, enrollment documents, and legacy paper records often exist outside the SIS. These require secure storage and FERPA compliance and must often be retained for 50 or more years.

Health Records

Vaccination records, allergy information, and other sensitive health data need HIPAA-compliant storage and must be easily accessible by authorized personnel such as nurses and physical education instructors to administer proper care and make necessary accommodations.

Supplemental Records 

Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), 504 plans, meeting notes, and other voluminous documents must be easily searchable if the district must prove that students are receiving the proper accommodations and academic care.

Administrative Records

Supply invoices, teacher certification records, and expense reports have mandated retention schedules, are subject to audits, and can be used in workflows such as invoice approval routing to further increase efficiency.

By indexing these records into a HIPAA and FERPA-compliant ECM solution, those with authorized access from any location can quickly call upon them. This ensures all faculty and administrators have access to the information they need while simplifying audits and legal litigation and securing this information through compliance best practices.

Archiving Legacy Student Records

Another challenge of student information systems is digitizing the legacy documentation a district has accumulated over the years. Despite whatever current technical infrastructure a district may have, there are bound to be decades of paper documents from earlier years that need to be digitally archived for the remainder of their retention period.

Using document capture software, these records can be scanned, and their contents converted to computer-legible text so that they can be easily searched through a number of queries. 

Converting Paper Student Records

One of the best methods for digitizing student records is to utilize barcode cover sheets containing frequently recurring index fields. For example, student information such as name and graduation year are common search queries in many record types such as cumulative, health, and supplemental records.

When the barcode cover sheet is scanned ahead of each record set, that student’s information is indexed effortlessly without needing an accuracy review. This expedites the archival process while ensuring accurate index fields can be used to search for the document easily.

Automating Administrative Tasks

Like all organizations, K-12 schools have budgets to report, supplies to purchase, and employees to manage, all leading to a slew of document-intensive processes that need to be regularly completed by administrators. 

Financial Reports

Many school districts are subject to regular financial review by state agencies to ensure budget money is being spent as allocated. This rigorous process requires countless financial documents to be located and sent.

Intelligent information management solutions allow instant, detailed searches for these documents so that they can be found, exported, and sent to state regulators.

Accounts Payable Automation

School districts also require supplies such as lab equipment, art supplies, writing utensils, calculators, and more. These supplies are often paid to vendors on credit, necessitating an accounts payable process, which is often subject to bottlenecks, delays, and tedious data entry when completed manually.

Intelligent Information management solutions allow for convenient invoice matching through easy document searches or full automation. They can route these invoices to approvers with frequent reminders to ensure a timely response.

These invoices can also be effortlessly digitized using AI-assisted capture, which saves tremendous amounts of time and money on implementation. The data lifted during this process can fuel financial systems to create payable invoices, perform general ledger coding, and more.

Human Resources Documentation

All schools have employment records they must maintain for faculty and staff. This human resources documentation includes teacher certifications, background checks, and I-9 forms.

Forms such as the I-9 employment verification form and W-4 tax form are complex and time-consuming. Web form solutions can guide new hires through the completion process and save time by automatically populating fields and making quick calculations.

These forms are subject to federal regulators’ audits, while background checks and teacher certifications protect districts against potential litigation. Archiving these documents in a searchable ECM solution allows them to be located whenever needed.

Summary

While student information systems are highly effective at streamlining school records management, there are limitations in the types of documents they can store, the archival of legacy records, and the level of automation they provide. By enhancing your SIS with intelligent information solutions such as ECM, Document Capture, Web Forms, and Workflow Automation, your district will have an end-to-end solution to its information challenges.

How Square 9 Can Help

Square 9 Softworks is an industry-leading provider of an AI-powered intelligent document processing platform that takes the paper out of education and makes it easier to get things done. By combining the best in enterprise content management for record retention and retrieval with back-office automation tools like invoice matching and routing and OCR technology that saves time and prevents costly errors, Square 9 offers intuitive, scalable solutions that will empower your school district for years to come.