AkuTrust™ e-Records Mgmt for Student Records
School districts create and maintain vast amounts of documents and records which are governed by local, state and federal regulations. Reducing the amount of paper being generated and eliminating paper records is a stated goal of education systems, and is being mandated by state legislators and is also a mandate under the Paper Reduction Act of the United States.
District registrars, counselors, teachers, and administrators spend large amounts of time managing documents. These records also consume file and physical space which leads into precious real estate being used for storage.
A key area of record management is the student's cumulative folder (SCF). This record is maintained by the district's registrars and must be managed in a secure environment as specified by their State’s Library and Archive Commission and the US Government’s FERPA and HIPAA regulations. Employees of a school district that have access to individual student records are legally and ethically obligated to safeguard all student information.
Despite these imperatives, most educational organizations are over burdened by their records, making the finding and utilization of information an arduous and time consuming process. AkuTrust, powered by SpringCM, is a robust and secure on-demand enterprise content and record management solution specifically designed to be easy to use, fast to deploy and much less expensive than on-premises software.
- Secure access controls and security of the electronically stored records
- Encourages "Best Practices" in student record management
- Provides for the management of active Student Cumulative Folders with embedded workflow
- Fully automates the creation, posting and management of a student's cumulative folder
- Allows for standardization of policies, procedures and organization of documents
- Ensures that only required documents are placed in the Student Cumulative Folder
- Documents are accessible in compliance with FERPA regulations
- Simplifies the required "student information" that the parent or legal guardian must verify
- Enables the campus registrar to import documents directly into the Student Cumulative Folder
- Enables the district to efficiently pass a record audit
- Enables the Student Cumulative Folder to be easily moved to another campus within the School District
- Achieves a fully configurable and rapid deployment solution at much lower cost than on-premise software
The AkuTrust e-Record Management for Student Records solution has many uses in educational organizations including:
- Automates processes and eliminates manual steps
- Eliminates paper and reduces physical storage requirements
- Provides a digital folder to authorized personnel without the need to go to the registrar's office to request a document review
- Assigns Student Cumulative Folder access rights based specific personnel and their responsibilities.
- Converts physical documents to an electronic format
- Provides fast viewing, retrieval and distribution of student information
- Controls and track access to ensure the privacy of student information and to produce more accurate audit trails to demonstrate compliance with FERPA
- Provides for the immediate transfer of records between campuses
- Allows for the automatic changing to “archive” status upon student graduation or withdrawal from district
- Produces reports based on captured metadata (e.g. demographic data)
- Full online access to student registration packets
- Ability to scan and file registration documents into the Student Cumulative Folder
- Batch scanning and importing of current Student Cumulative Folder files into the system
- Serves as a central, secure repository of all records
- Capture of all documents via traditional scanning or e-mail- and fax-addressable folders
- Full-text OCR and imaging of all documents with automatic indexing of important data
- Routing and Approval Workflows to facilitate common processes
- Document Check-in and Check-out to control versions and users
- Complete auditing of every document and process touch-point
- Pinpoint "annotation" functionality that enables you to make revisions without altering the original file
- Redundant off-site storage to protect data and ensure continuity
Integrating AkuTrust with your educational and operational systems is a crucial component of overall document management and process automation. The SpringCM platform offers a number of ways to integrate your systems from the very basic to the most elegant using our service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services.
For example, in the State of Texas, Harding DMS is looking to utilize the newly published XML interface to automatically "push" a student’s transcript request by higher education into TREx (Texas Records Exchange System). This will eliminate the need for the high school campus registrar to manually enter the required information for the requesting university or college.
AkuTrust e-Record Management for Student Records is being used by major school districts in Texas to implement paperless solutions that increase productivity and reduce overall operational costs. AkuTrust was specifically developed for the education market with particular focus on the management of student records. Initially deployed in 2002 for the management of archive graduation and withdrawal records, the system has been expanded to include the management of active student records. With the power of SpringCM, the system will also support the district’s business records including human resources, finance, and board minutes.
