Hazleton has historically had a large population of temporary residents. That has long meant a higher-than-average number of new student registrations each summer (and through the school year) for the 10,000-student HASD – one of the fastest-growing districts in the state.

Registration Gateway is designed to make compliance easy, increasing funding opportunities and mitigating legal exposure. From National School Lunch Program data reporting to documentation needs stemming Pennsylvania’s Act 26 Parental Registration Statement, SRC Solutions software makes it simple for districts to deal with regulatory burdens.

The situation was becoming taxing for the district’s two registrars. The sheer amount of data to be entered into PowerSchool was overwhelming, and the number of open registration nights that needed to be held was growing. Traditional registration just wasn’t going to cut it anymore.

The answer? SRC Solutions’ Registration Gateway, the only truly paperless online student registration, re-enrollment and information tracking system. With support for multiple languages and automatic PowerSchool integration, it was just what the Hazleton schools needed.

The HASD launched Registration Gateway for kindergarten registration this spring. The result? Shorter waits at registration nights for parents – especially those with multiple children – and dramatically reduced data entry needs. And even more savings are coming this summer, when new student registration season gears up.

“The Registration Gateway system is a huge help for us,” said Dr. Jeffry Nietz, the HASD’s Student Information Systems Administrator. “The registration secretary doesn’t have to enter 16 pages of information per student into PowerSchool anymore. For families with three or four kids, that would have been hours of work before they could start school. Now, those delays should be much shorter, and data should be error-free.”

That’s good for parents, good for school staff – and good for taxpayers.

“Parents love it, and my registrars love it,” Nietz said. “Even though we’re only in the ‘soft launch’ phase, 90 percent of the feedback we’re getting is positive. So far, it’s been a wonderful thing from the standpoint of kindergarten registration.

“The staff at SRC has been tremendous in communicating with us, helping get Registration Gateway set up right and pushing us to get done with what we needed to do to meet our timetable.”

They needed a trusted partner who could help guide them on their way to a cost-effective, paperless solution that would ease the workload on both parents and staff.

And they found just that in SRC Solutions, the makers of Registration Gateway – the only true paperless student registration, re-enrollment and information tracking system of its kind.

“We chose SRC because it seemed to be a step ahead of the competition, with greater automation and less manual intervention to move student data between systems,” Cedar Springs Public Schools CIO Krista Lilley said.

Cedar Springs had done its homework before rolling out Registration Gateway last fall – they knew they were getting a quality online registration and re-enrollment system. What they didn’t know was how much value they’d get from the solution.

Cedar Springs had done its homework before rolling out Registration Gateway last fall – they knew they were getting a quality online registration and re-enrollment system. What they didn’t know was how much value they’d get from the solution.

The SRC product ships with Xerox’s DocuShare content management system, which automatically stores a PDF copy of every form generated by Registration Gateway. When used in conjunction with Registration Gateway’s automatic student information system integration, DocuShare was a home run for Cedar Springs.

“The DocuShare system was an added bonus beyond what we were initially looking for,” Lilley said. “We ultimately intend to expand our DocuShare use to replace our physical student record files.”

Registration Gateway is designed to help districts like Cedar Springs get to exactly that point. And it’s working in Michigan.

Lilley said most of the district’s parents are enjoying the new paperless system, which has sped up the registration and re-enrollment process. And the reaction from school staff has been “overwhelmingly positive.”

“Our staff loves the immediate notification for new students, as well as having the automatic calling feature reminding parents of needed documents,” Lilley said. “Our secretaries like having the student data automatically filled into our SIS automatically and immediately.”

All in all, Cedar Springs is loving the Registration Gateway experience.

“The system has been working reliably,” Lilley said. “The implementation staff at SRC has been great to work with; they’ve been open to making sure the paperless registration system is meeting our needs.

“I’m encouraged by the rapid development of the product and the listening ear of the company for future enhancements.”

SRC Solutions, developers of groundbreaking paperless enrollment, downstream reporting, compliance and document tracking software, has announced the launch of School Choice/Open Enrollment Gateway, a rules-based solution to the unique challenges presented by school choice and open enrollment processes.

SC/OE Gateway is the only school-selection solution to feature a built-in rules engine – enabling administers to adjust or change rules in-house. The solution’s configurable design puts the ability to adjust the rules engine in the hands of district employees, rather than outside contractors.

“School Choice/Open Enrollment Gateway builds on the advantages already offered by Registration Gateway,” SRC Solutions Founder and CEO Patrick Maher said. “Collecting school preferences is as simple as building a few fields into the existing online registration and re-enrollment process. Once the solution has matched a student with an open seat, it can automatically notify parents with their child’s placement information.

“School Choice/Open Enrollment Gateway is a configurable, rules-based solution that streamlines the process for both school staffs and parents.”

It had to go.

After a lengthy search for a partner in the transition to paperless registration, Lawrence settled on SRC Solutions. A year into the relationship, the results are even better than the district could have imagined.

Parents love being able to use Registration Gateway to register their children from any computer with an internet connection. School officials love SRC’s responsiveness. And everyone – from taxpayers to administrators – loves the quicker- and larger-than-expected return on investment.

Parents love being able to use Registration Gateway to register their children from any computer with an internet connection. School officials love SRC’s responsiveness. And everyone loves – from taxpayers to administrators – loves the ROI.

“We’re very happy with Registration Gateway,” Lawrence Township Public Schools’ Beth Farletta said. “There have been cost savings in places you don’t really think about until they happen. We used to have to copy thousands of documents and forward them to individual schools, where they had to be filed. That’s all gone. One-hundred percent of it.”

Under Lawrence’s old registration and re-enrollment system, parents came to a central location, picked up a large packet of documents and either filled them out on the spot or took them home. All that information was then keyed, by hand, into PowerSchool.

That took a long time. And came with its own set of problems.

“Sometimes, you couldn’t read parents’ handwriting,” Farletta said. “Especially these days, with email addresses. You couldn’t tell if they’re trying to tell you it’s a ‘1’ or an ‘L’ or an ‘I.’ And parents would sometimes skip key sections. We’d have to keep prompting them to give that information and explain why it’s important.

“With Registration Gateway, we can mark important fields as ‘required,’ so parents can’t skip them. There’s been such an improvement, it’s hard to even communicate it with people.”

Things are destined to keep improving. Lawrence is in the home stretch of integrating SRC’s Info Update Module, which will allow parents to instantly update emergency contact information for existing students.

Until now, Lawrence had been sending home a physical emergency contact form each year. That meant even more manual data entry for district employees – and more massive piles of paper.

Not anymore.

“In the beginning, people balked a little at the move to paperless registration,” Farletta said. “But everyone is loving it now. We went from having all paper forms with someone having to input each into our PowerSchool system to having two systems talk to each other.”

Registration Gateway is SRC Solutions’ flagship product that is designed to simplify the student registration process by minimizing data inaccuracies, removing repetitive administrative tasks and driving down maintenance cost. Earlier this year, SRC Solutions and Surety announced that they had partnered together to integrate Surety’s AbsoluteProof data integrity protection solution into SRC’s Registration Gateway application to secure the authenticity of the students’ electronic records. AbsoluteProof applies a tamper-evident, digital “seal” to each record, providing long-term and independent proof that the record’s content existed at a particular point in time and has not been altered since. The application legally ensures student record integrity.

 “We’ve worked hard to provide our customers with the tools they need to successfully implement a paperless environment within K-12 school environments, and winning this award is a great feat for us,” said Patrick Maher, founder and CEO of SRC Solutions.

“The strength of SRC’s Registration Gateway product is that it enables the school systems to achieve the cost and efficiency benefits of a fully electronic solution, while eliminating the data integrity risks associated with electronic recordkeeping,” says Jim O’Connor, president and CEO of Surety. “SRC’s Registration Gateway not only simplifies and improves the student registration process, but it now offers a more secure approach than any paper-based process that it replaces.”

EdTech Digest is a publication featuring leaders in and around the education sector who are dedicated to making a difference for future generations through the innovative use of technology. Its award program recognizes individuals and technologies that are setting trends and best practices for achieving a healthy future for the education space. Registration Gateway was named a Cool Tool award winner within the security/privacy solution category because of its ability to simplify and improve the student registration process and its attention to the importance of authenticity for the duration of students’ academic careers.

“To be recognized as a Cool Tool really demonstrates the need and importance of secure recordkeeping, especially dealing with the sensitive information students accumulate over the course of their academic years. With Surety’s help, we’re able to provide our customers with the resources they need to guarantee personal record protection to students, parents and district officials.”

For more information, visit surety.com and registrationgateway.com.

Click here to download brochure (PDF)

About Surety, LLC

Founded in 1994, Surety is the world’s leading provider of technology to protect the integrity and authenticity of digital information. Surety’s founders were pioneers in the field of cryptographic timestamping, and to this day, Surety provides the market’s best solution for long-term, independent proof of electronic data integrity through its AbsoluteProof Service. With millions of electronic records and files worldwide protected under its authenticity Seal, AbsoluteProof can be deployed at all levels – from the desktop or the enterprise to the cloud – and provides an ideal solution to the challenges of protecting intellectual property and online or digital evidence, and proving the authenticity of electronic records. For more information, visit surety.com.

About SRC Solutions Inc.

Founded in 2001, SRC Solutions, Inc. provides a gateway to improved productivity and profitability for educational, government and private industry customers. SRC’s flagship solution, Registration Gateway, enables schools and other higher learning educational institutions and organizations to save time and money from paperless enrollment, downstream reporting, compliance and document tracking. SRC identifies cumbersome, repetitive, counter-productive work procedures and replaces them with easy-to-use, intuitive solutions and streamlined digital processes. As a XEROX® Platinum Partner and an authorized reseller for Kofax, Surety and Recruit Manager, SRC provides solutions for both the public and private sector, including document management, workflow improvement and integration into numerous ERP systems. SRC Solutions, Inc.: Where process meets technology.

Until the 2011-12 school year, parents of children in the district were tasked with filling out several registration and re-enrollment forms each summer. And parents with more than one child in Nixa schools were forced to enter the same information, by hand, multiple times.

It was, quite simply, a pain. But no longer.

Now that Nixa Public Schools uses SRC’s Registration Gateway solution, the days of the district’s parents dealing with endless paperwork are over. For the first time this summer, they simply entered student and contact information into Registration Gateway’s intuitive wizard interface, saving time and headaches.

The best part going forward? No repeat work for multiple children.

FRPL Gateway has increased Nixa’s funding opportunities, and – most importantly – offered more students access to nutritious lunches.

The district has benefited, too. Under the old, paper-based system, Nixa registrars needed to manually key data into the student information system. With Registration Gateway, integration with PowerSchool is automatic.

As a result, accuracy and consistency of parent and student data has increased.

“Now, information just transfers into our student information system,” Nixa PowerSchool/core data coordinator Caralyn Millsap said. “The accuracy is there now, and it saves time for the registrars. There are multiple benefits from it.”

Likewise, participation in Nixa’s free and reduced-price lunch program has increased significantly since the district implemented SRC’s FRPL Gateway solution. FRPL applications used to be sent home as part of a stack of paper documents – a situation that made them all too easy to miss or ignore. Now, all Nixa parents see an electronic copy of the FRPL application as part of the registration and re-enrollment process.

The new, online process has increased Nixa’s funding opportunities, and – most importantly – offered more students access to nutritious lunches. Two-hundred more students qualified for the FRPL program in ’11-12 than ’10-11.

“We’re delighted with Nixa’s success using Registration Gateway and FRPL Gateway,” SRC Solutions Founder and CEO Patrick Maher said. “When the enrollment and re-enrollment processes are easier, parents save time, and districts have more resources to focus on their ultimate goal – providing quality educations.”

SRC Solution’s revolutionary, paperless student enrollment software can now incorporate legacy paper records.

SRC Solutions, developers of the Registration Gateway online student enrollment software, has announced the launch of a Backfile Scanning Module for its paperless system. The new solution takes advantage of the scanning equipment and content management system schools already use for Registration Gateway, allowing teachers, staff and administrators to securely access and easily search an organized database of previously registered students.

By scanning existing students’ paper documents and making them accessible online, school districts avoid the issue of having to physically store and locate the paper records, saving precious space, time and money.

With Registration Gateway in place, all of a school district’s new registration and re-enrollment documents are automatically integrated into the digital filing system. Now, the Backfile Scanning Module allows users to access 100 percent of their student information via Xerox® DocuShare– even documentation completed under traditional, paper-based systems. As with all SRC Solutions Gateway products, access to information is available only to authorized personnel.

“The Backfile Scanning Module gives school districts an electronic dashboard of their entire student population with the click of a mouse,” SRC Solutions Founder and CEO Patrick Maher said. “It’s a natural extension of the Registration Gateway platform. Not having to physically look for or file papers saves schools time and space – which is especially important now, with both in short supply. And storing student data electronically gives schools a solid disaster backup plan, which lets them stop worrying about flooding, fire or theft.”

The Registration Gateway Backfile Scanning Module is also suitable for scanning records and documents from other school departments, including human resources, administration, transportation and more.

Life just got a little easier for parents of school-age children in the city of Buffalo, N.Y. The Buffalo Public School Board has approved a five-year contract to replace its complicated, paper-based enrollment and re-enrollment system with SRC Solutions’ revolutionary Registration Gateway software.

Thanks to Registration Gateway, parents will be able to register or re-enroll their child  for BPS almost entirely online starting with the 2013-14 school year. The district’s current paper-based registration process has come under fire for its complex nature: Parents must locate a physical form, then fill out a confusing series of questions relating to school preferences, No Child Left Behind and more.

The new online paperless system will allow  parents to enter student data through a web-based application from home, and supporting documents will be easily scanned and instantly added to the student’s digital file during the registration process. Registration Gateway will load all the necessary information automatically into BPS’s Student Information System.  Implementations of Registration Gateway in other districts have cut registration and re-enrollment time in half, and saved school districts tens of thousands of dollars in labor and record storage costs.

“We’re delighted parents in the Buffalo Public School system will soon be able to use Registration Gateway to enroll and re-enroll their children,” SRC Solutions Founder and CEO Patrick Maher said. “By taking registration paperless, BPS is saving its schools and its parents countless amounts of time, money and stress.”

SRC Solutions announced the availability of its new software application, Human Resources Gateway. This configurable, web-based software application offers a simpler, more uniform process for managing Human Resources Onboarding processes and document submission through the use of secure, digital storage and automated archival of all personnel data documentation. Human Resources Gateway improves efficiencies through the elimination of manual document tracking, various organizational issues and provides a structure for the HR process securely enabling the submission of documents and data.

“Human Resources Gateway was developed in response to an increasing demand to manage Human Resources departments’ paper records in a greener and more efficient manner,” said Patrick Maher, Founder and CEO of SRC Solutions. “The software application is a natural extension of our Registration Gateway platform for student registration, purpose-built to assist schools in managing teacher and staff information. Human Resources Gateway also works equally well in a corporate environment by eliminating paper-related problems encountered by the Human Resources managers in these companies.”

Human Resources Gateway offers users a variety of other features to improve the Human Resources Onboarding process. The platform allows control over who sees what data—inside and outside of the organization—and includes features such as automated application processing and search options to improve the users’ efficiency. The system also reduces lost and misplaced documentation by tracking and notifying users of missing and late required documents.

The open-ended solution seamlessly integrates with a variety of existing document and content management systems and many financial and ERP systems. Human Resources Gateway also offers improved technological efficiency by functioning through a single portal application and requiring IT departments using the platform to support only one integrated system.

Nixa — As the school year began, RaeLynn Anderson spent less than 15 minutes enrolling her daughter as a freshman at Nixa High School — and she filled out the forms on her laptop while she watched TV.

So the district’s online registration system, new this fall, is fine with her.

“Anytime they can eliminate the mountains of paperwork that we get home on the first day of school I think is helpful, because I just don’t know if a lot of people read everything that comes home,” Anderson said.

As one of the first area districts to require online registration, Nixa hopes to cut costs and increase accuracy and privacy of information as it reduces the amount of paperwork through the EZ School Registration system, said Zac Rantz, communication coordinator for the schools.

“I do not know of another district that has gone completely online with everything as we have,” Rantz said.

Instead of filling out a stack of paper forms on everything from enrollment and medical information to technology use and the free and reduced-price lunch program, parents and guardians are now going online to supply data.

Some have suggested improvements. While the process wasn’t time-consuming for Anderson, for example, she said she knows of parents with several children who didn’t like the fact that they had to enter family information more than once online.

Yet many have offered positive feedback about the new system, Rantz said — “along the lines of ‘It’s about time. We’re glad that you’ve done that.’”

Nothing new

Online information isn’t new to the Nixa School District.

For a couple of years, families have been able to access grades, attendance reports and other student information through the district’s PowerSchool system, Rantz said.

But last year, a district Comprehensive School Improvement Plan committee began to look into online registration, too, after discovering that more than 90 percent of Nixa families have home computers with Internet access — and that implementation and licensing fees for an online system would cost less than the usual process.

By the end of the 2010-2011 school year, the district was notifying families of the upcoming change — or mandate, since Rantz said there’s no traditional paperwork alternative for less-than-computer-savvy patrons.

Learning curve

At new student enrollment in early August and as school began, however, staff and volunteers helped those who needed either coaching or computer access.

And the district will continue to offer help and access, Rantz said: At Inman Intermediate School, office manager Sue Clement has reserved a computer for parents’ use.

“My kiosk, I like to call it,” she said with a laugh.

Saving time, costs

While learning how to use the new system is taking some time right now, Clement said it is already saving time, too.

Although she and other office managers do double-check online forms to make sure the schools have all the information they need, they no longer have to input information from paper — a process that once took months, Rantz said, with about 5,800 students in the district.

In addition, as students are enrolled online, the system sends automatic emails to those in charge of services such as special education or the free and reduced-price lunch program, so staff can match students with services more quickly.

“There’s been many times a child has walked in with their parents to meet us and receive a teacher, and we’re ready,” Clement said. “We’ve got all that background information for them, so we can place them, and we can start serving them right away.”

With an implementation and training fee of $9,995 and an annual license fee of $12,000, the system isn’t free.

But it didn’t take too many calculations for the district to realize that copying, paper, postage and staff hours cost more, Rantz said, especially when it came to sending summertime packets at $1 in postage alone to Nixa’s 1,600 or so high school students.

Multiple benefits

Accuracy and privacy are other attributes of the new system, he said.

Mistakes still pop up on online forms, but office managers don’t have to contend with deciphering poor handwriting.

The online system also makes families’ applications for the free and reduced-price lunch program even more confidential than turning in sealed envelopes, a district practice since 2008 that led to greater participation in the program.

“This is a just a way for parents to apply even more anonymously,” Rantz said.

Yet greater positive personal interaction between families and staff — without sheets of paper between them — was one of the first benefits Clement saw at Inman.

“This time, when we had orientation, they walked in and they truly got to meet the teacher, and the teacher could talk to them about expectations,” she said. “We weren’t giving them all these sheets of information and saying, ‘Do this, do this.’”

SOURCE:  news-leader.com