Schools turn to online form filing, storage

Local school districts are joining the growing number of businesses and government agencies filing and storing forms online.

Parents of Celina and Fort Recovery students can fill out registration, medical documents and other records online to save the district paper and parents time from filling out the same forms every year, school officials said.

But digital records face the risk of being exposed to hackers, stressed Cheryl Pearson, director of the Better Business Bureau West Central Ohio office. Bureau Northwest Ohio Office President Richard, Eppstein agreed, saying anybody can be hacked, and hackers have access to more records than they would have by breaking into a filing cabinet.

Once hackers have access to the documents, they can use the information for their benefit and usually put the records for sale on the dark web, he said.

To prevent hacking, they said school districts should ask for references and make sure the storage service has security measures in place.

"Putting records in the cloud is not new," Celina City Schools Superintendent Ken Schmiesing said. "Everything is going digital these days."

The first area district to store medical forms digitally was Fort Recovery, superintendent Justin Firks said. District officials researched different services and notified parents months in advance before starting to use Final Forms two school years ago to allow parents to submit student medical forms online. The records are stored in a third party's database and can be updated each year, he pointed out.

"It has been well received so far," Firks said. "It used to take 45 minutes to fill out that paperwork. Now parents don't have to fill them out and they can be updated as needed."

Students' forms can be accessed on the go by their coaches, so they don't have to lug around paperwork for each student to each game, Firks noted.

Celina Schools officials heard about this and last school year chose Final Forms to store student athletic participation forms for grades 7-12.

This was the first step in modernizing the district's record-keeping, Schmiesing said. Taking it a step further, the district has also began using Final Forms for registration to save parents more time, he added.

District officials at the beginning of the year took also started using Yellow Folder to store student records in the cloud, but parents were not notified as the district has already been putting grades in the parents' hands with Progress Book book for some time now, Schmiesing said.

The decision was made as the district continues to deal with documents piling up and taking up space in filing cabinets, Schmiesing said. When storing a document, Schmiesing said a school employee just scans it and Yellow Folder takes care of the rest.

"This will save our district time, space and money, all of which will go back to the student's education," Schmiesing said.

School officials noted Yellow Folder will not sell or share any information and works only with the district. Documents can be viewed only by authorized staff on an as-needed basis.