Smooth Conversion to Online Records
Idaho Virtual Academy Tames Paper Tiger
with EZContentManager
At Idaho’s largest public charter school, kids and
teachers are often hundreds of miles apart. That’s
because the school is virtual. Students study at
home, connecting with teachers online, over the
phone, and at regular get-togethers.
Idaho Virtual Academy (IDVA) started six years ago
with 500 students; it’s now grown to 2,526 students,
63 teachers, and 12 administrators.
Despite the fact that the teaching happens online,
the record-keeping did not --- until recently. That
change was prompted by the need to buy another
filing cabinet.
“These filing cabinets are five feet tall, three feet wide,
they’re fireproof, and they cost about $10,000 each,”
says Kerri Pickett-Hoffman, IDVA’s Academic
Services Director. The school already had five
cabinets, and no space for another.
Cost was another issue. Whenever a new student
arrives, the school must request a cumulative file of
their entire records. And whenever a student leaves,
IDVA must copy the entire record for itself, then ship
out the file to the new school: a time-consuming
chore that can easily take 10 minutes a file.
“Sometimes these records are two inches thick, so it’s
a problem to have that much paper to copy and ship,”
says Pickett-Hoffman.
But the main issue was that IDVA’s teachers needed
better access to student records to help make timely
and effective decisions on their students’
education.
Since teachers are legally responsible for
maintaining student records, and the school is
responsible for keeping them in one place, teachers
often had to fax or mail updates to the school
headquarters in Boise.
“After an incident where a teacher needed a student’s
file to make a decision and couldn’t get at it, we
realized we needed to get that information into
teachers’ hands more quickly,” says Pickett-Hoffman.
“So space was one issue, cost was another, and the
teacher’s lack of access to records was another.”
Checklist shows ACOM twice
as easy to use
The school sent out an RFP for a paperless records
system in January 2007. Naturally enough, officials
wanted to do business locally, if they could find an
Idaho-based company.
But when Pickett-Hoffman reviewed the bids, the
EZContentManager (EZCM) system from ACOM
came out on top.
For example, on the checklist of
features the school needed, ACOM scored “easy” or
“very easy” on 16 tasks; twice as many as the
competing system. So IDVA decided to go with
California-based ACOM.
”What attracted us was the interface, and how it was
naturally intuitive,” says IDVA Technology Manager
Chase Trapp. In fact, he compares EZCM to
Windows XP, which his staff and teachers already
know --- while the competing system reminded him
of Windows 3.1, a hangover from the 1980s.
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