This post is part of The Datamation Guide to Managing School District Records.
It is legally necessary that student records are kept for a certain amount of time, often until long after the student graduates or leaves. These records contain information like the student’s name, address, contact information of the parent or legal guardian, grades and test scores, health and discipline records, attendance records, and more personal, vital information. How long this information needs to be kept often differs by state or even by school district.
Most public schools are required by law to have some kind of records management policy in place. With the help of administrators and the school’s legal counsel team, the school board makes a plan that stipulates how long it is appropriate to keep student records, often based on state standards. Making and following this kind of plan prevents schools from being penalized for destroying a record too soon.
It is necessary to keep records in the event of an investigation of a student or a lawsuit against the school. If either of these scenarios occur and there is no documentation to support either events, the school itself is liable to punishment.
When your district is working with paper documents, having to remember the right date to destroy old records can be tedious and prone to error. These files also take up huge amounts of space when stored in boxes and filing cabinets, not to mention that they are extremely susceptible to fire and flood damage. Recovering these documents after a disaster is difficult and painstaking, and can take time that your district doesn’t have.
Digitizing your records with Datamation can make document compliance effortless. After your documents are scanned, you can use one of many enterprise content management (ECM) systems offered to implement retention policies that keep track of compliance dates for you, eliminating the need to manually keep track of the dates and the worry of non-compliance. Besides compliance, scanning your records allows for quick access, organization, and storage in the digital cloud or a single disk. Your records are also always safe from physical harm and natural disasters.
Maintaining compliance is lawfully necessary, and more practically, it helps protect your school from being unprepared during student or employee investigations and lawsuits. It’s up to your district to create a compliance and retention plan, but that plan will always be optimized when your district scans student and employee records.
Make compliance organized and effortless with Datamation.
