InfoSnap Integrated With Skyward Helps Yakima School District 7 Customize Data Collection to Meet District and Washington State Policy Requirements
Austin, Texas (PRWEB) March 11, 2014 -- Nearly 3,000 new students register every year at Yakima School District 7 in Yakima, WA. For each new student, there are approximately ten forms that are required to be filled out. That’s roughly 30,000 sheets of paper that Yakima staff is inundated with prior to the start of each school year. Roy Knox, Director of Technology and Central Registration, required accurate and up-to-date information for all students before the first day of school and maintaining a complete collection of students’ medical history was imperative in his pursuit for a customized, secure, and integrated online solution.
“We needed parents to have the ability to input their child’s immunization history online,” says Knox. This required online information collection followed by data integration with their student information system (SIS) and Knox achieved this when he partnered with InfoSnap. In order for Yakima to manage the collected information, a SkyBuild import utility template had to be designed to ensure matching of fields. “An [off-the-shelf template] was already built when we first started,” states Knox. “But, InfoSnap customized that with the specific tables we needed for Yakima to meet our district and Washington State policy requirements.” Additionally, Yakima wanted certain features enabled in order meet their data collection requests and InfoSnap’s experience with customizing SkyBuild templates and integrating with Skyward provided Yakima with the personalized solution they were seeking.
The unparalleled knowledge and support from InfoSnap’s solution specialists and the partnership built with Yakima’s school district provided a precise tool to collect immunization data for new registrations which proved to be a time saving opportunity. “Having spent numerous years in application development, and understanding those challenges, this turned out to be a good experience,” says Knox. “We’ve had application development processes that have gone the other way but InfoSnap had no problem meeting the custom requirements.”
In addition to the importance of having current information in their SIS, Knox was looking for a smooth transition with little paperwork for this rapidly growing community. “The repetition of doing double work had to be eliminated,” states Knox. “We’d often have to go back and ask parents for missing information from the forms they would fill out. Part-time staff was brought in during busy times and after years; it became vital to have an efficient process in place.”
The move from a paper-based process to a streamlined online solution from InfoSnap added value, simplicity, and legibility for the staff of Yakima. “We can read the documents and the online application process won’t allow a parent to complete it if required fields aren’t filled in,” says Knox. “Information is available and stored so we can go back and look at them. The supporting documents are able to be uploaded and we can recapture and visit those easily. It has saved our district an immense amount of time in data entry.”
An added benefit from implementing a customized solution came to light for Yakima when a military family was scheduled to move back to the state from Burma. “The parent logged on to our school district website, found the online registration from InfoSnap and registered her child,” says Angela Gjestrum, WESPaC Student Records Supervisor at Yakima. “She was out of the country but knew she would be arriving back to Yakima. That, in a nutshell, is how important the InfoSnap solution has been for us to meet our family needs. It creates a level of efficiency for not only Yakima School District, but for the public as well.”
Danielle Tyler, Infosnap, Inc., +1 (512) 375-4583, [email protected]
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