Guthrie Public Schools

The city of Guthrie, Oklahoma dates back to the early 1900s when it became the first state capital. Since that time, the Guthrie school system has kept records for its students and employees. Today, the school has over 200 employees serving more than 3,000 students. And requirements for record keeping are more extensive than they were 100 years ago. The result is an ever-expanding volume of paperwork the school has to maintain.

As Guthrie’s IT director for over two decades, Dee Benson has been on a mission to eliminate paper storage for years. His resolve grew when district enrollment requirements changed, forcing students to prove residency. That meant administrative staff would now have to spend endless hours photocopying and filing over 6,000 documents at the beginning of the school year, adding to the stacks of paperwork they were already managing. Benson knew they needed a more efficient solution to process and archive their records.

Benson has long been a fan of ScanSnap scanning technology. When he saw one of the company’s scanners perform at an Adobe Max conference years ago, he was impressed. “We liked it so much, we started putting them on our administrative assistants’ desks,” he says.

As the school district’s residency requirements took effect, Benson set up a station with ScanSnap scanners. When parents came in to enroll their children, Guthrie’s staff could scan a student’s proof of residency documents and save them to a folder earmarked for that child in the cloud. Little did Benson know how valuable this setup would be when the COVID-19 pandemic descended, allowing parents to use the scanning stations themselves while masked and socially distanced.

Since they’re using Chromebooks with ScanSnap’s Home app, it’s easy to scan the paperwork and save everything in the Google Drive. “We don’t have to have a PC with all that extra software installed on it,” Benson says. “Not only am I saving local hard drive space, it’s backed up and easily searchable in the cloud.”

During the summer months when school activity slowed down, Benson and some personnel were able to digitize the school’s personnel files and archive them in the cloud.

Their next step was to begin tackling the student records in nearly 100 file cabinets. Since the room where they were housed was slated to become part of a cafeteria remodel, the impetus was even greater to get rid of all that paper. The team started by scanning the documents the school is legally required to retain. While Benson and team have only made a small dent, their efforts are paying off.

“When our registrar was on vacation for a couple weeks over the summer, the high school principal called me,” recalls Benson. “He needed information about a student. Rather than walking down the hall to ask the registrar for help or rifling through four or five filing cabinets, he found their file by pulling up the student’s name in their online archival system. He thought that was the greatest thing he’d ever seen.”

By having all of an employee’s or student’s documents in one PDF file, anyone with permission can quickly search for a name and then scan through the file for what they need. This has cut down on the time needed to share records between school districts too.

Moving forward, Benson expects to continue to add to their growing lineup of twelve ScanSnap document scanners—streamlining the enrollment and record-keeping processes and digitizing all of their student records. “Thanks to ScanSnap, we’re not chasing paper everywhere,” says Benson.