Hackettstown Board of Education | Hackettstown, New Jersey
Summary:
Faced with various student record retention requirements, the Hackettstown, New Jersey School District needed a way to manage the more than 350,000 documents of student record files they had stored in mostly unlabeled boxes in three different locations. With the help of IMR Digital, the school district was able to digitize the more than 350,000 records, allowing them to enable quick keyword searches and securely store the documents.
The Customer:
The Board of Education for the Hackettstown, New Jersey School District is dedicated to educating and inspiring students so that they become positive, contributing members of today’s global society. In addition to providing students with a world-class education, Hackettstown schools are also responsible for preserving and maintaining detailed records for each student.
The Challenge:
Any school district that receives federal or state funding must comply with various student record retention requirements. The Hackettstown Board of Education faced the challenge of how to best retain and preserve records that were being stored at its schools and other facilities. The files were stored in more than 100 boxes in three different locations. Many of the boxes lacked labels, making it difficult to locate a file if someone requested a record.
Hackettstown distributed a request for proposal seeking the best solution for converting and managing the 350,000 documents that had accumulated at the schools. IMR Digital was selected by Hackettstown to provide a complete document conversion solution.
The Solution:
IMR Digital deployed its bonded and insured couriers to each location to retrieve all of the stored documents. At each location, IMR Digital conducted a pre-transport document box inventory, labeling and securely sealing each box. The secure fleet of transport vehicles was tracked along the route to the IMR Digital production facility in West Hazleton, PA, where the boxes were then logged into IMR Digital’s production tracking system.
Over a three week period, IMR Digital’s document specialists prepared and digitized more than 350,000 records. The documents included everything from middle and high school student records to special education and special services plans. Each document was meticulously prepared prior to conversion to ensure the highest reproduction quality.
The Results:
Converting the documents from paper to digital provided many benefits to the Hackettstown Board of Education. The single-pass OCR (optical character recognition) process transforms documents into a digital format that can be edited and printed and also enables quick keyword searches that are not possible with paper-based files.
More importantly, the document conversion allows Hackettstown to securely store the records and protect them from unauthorized access or damage from the elements – the first step in facilitating a disaster recovery plan.
Once the conversion process was completed, IMR Digital provided Hackettstown with an electronic file containing all 350,000 documents. After the school district did a quality control review to ensure that all records had been converted, Hackettstown opted to have the original records destroyed and was provided with a certificate of destruction!