Meet Allan Miller, CoPrincipal at Shelburne Community School in Vermont. Allan implemented Informed K12 to gather student information for his school to help save time for his team and prevent outdated or inaccurate parent or guardian contact information from being on file.
I hate inefficiency and redundancy, constantly finding myself hampered by a lack of time to complete those things that are important because of antiquated systems that fail to incorporate the potential of 21st century technology... [Having outdated or inaccurate contact information] was not only inconvenient but potentially a huge safety issue if we needed that information for an emergency contact.
Can you share a little about yourself and your school?
Shelburne Community School in Vermont is a pre-K through 8th grade school with 780 students in a beautiful northern Vermont community located on the shore of Lake Champlain. I have been at the school for the past five years, moving here from Alaska after retiring from teaching in the Last Frontier since 1985.
My wife and I came to Vermont to be back around our respective families who live in NY, and to allow our three children the opportunity to be able to spend quality time with their Grandparents. We selected Vermont since it is a great place to raise kids and we found it to have some great schools and communities that really value and support education.
Why did you decide to implement electronic forms? What have you learned along the way?
I hate inefficiency and redundancy, constantly finding myself hampered by a lack of time to complete those things that are important because of antiquated systems that fail to incorporate the potential of 21st century technology. Watching our administrative assistants send out paper forms and then struggle for weeks to collect them from students / parents was a poignant example of something that we knew there had to be a way to solve.
When we first read about Informed K12 it hit us like an epiphany – this should be something that could help everyone from parents to teachers to support staff do some necessary work in a much more efficient and effective manner. So far it has completely exceeded our expectations and we have had nothing but positive feedback from everyone.
What is an example of where you’ve designed new processes and seen tangible results?
Our most successful project so far has been to digitally collect our beginning of the year demographic information on all of our students. In the past we would send out 800 paper copies in the school startup packets and then they would dribble in for weeks as parents slowly found the papers and then the time to send them. Inevitably they also did a cursory review of their information so that we would end up with nonworking email addresses and cell phones in our records.
This was not only inconvenient but potentially a huge safety issue if we needed that information for an emergency contact. Our administrative assistants report that in one year they have gone from regularly finding inaccurate information to having it become a rarity – Informed K12 allowed parents to quickly review the information online and receiving it digitally also assuring we weren’t spending hours typing from illegible copies. Like most schools we use an electronic phone / email distribution system for reminders and notices – Informed K12 has also allowed us to greatly reduce the number of rejections from these distributions. In sum – it’s really helped us improve our communication channels and cut down on time wasted in the process of collecting that information accurately. We’re fully sold on Informed K12 just based on this one experience!
What would you recommend to peers at other schools who want to improve an existing way of doing things?
I would encourage every school to think about what process right now move with pieces of paper passes from hand to hand – our theory is that Informed K12 will allow us to move these to an efficient, more manageable system of digital workflow that not only will be less time consuming but also result in a better outcome for everyone involved in the process.
Right now we are working with Informed K12 to see if we can automate our end of school check-out – a tedious tradition wherein teachers move through an 8-10 person checklist wrapping up their year with the library, attendance secretary, administrators, athletic director, bookkeeper, etc.
We all hate the system – but without it someone has to spend hours in the summer figuring out the info the checklist allows us to collect. There has to be a better way and we think with Informed K12 we’ve found the solution. Think about these types of situations we all have in our schools and I bet you’ll soon see the utility of what Informed K12 has to offer.
