Like taxes, paperwork is simply a fact of life for all schools across the country. Some information is just too sensitive for emails and text messages, and many local, state and federal laws require physical forms. This need for paperwork can cause some problems for schools, as a recent scenario in Camden, New Jersey, highlights.
Doing away with paperwork to feed hungry kids
Free or reduced price lunches have long been a staple source of nutrition and sustenance for students in low-income homes for decades. According to The Courier-Post, approximately 6.4 million students across the country get free meals while at school. While this program has been a major boon for those who have qualified, others have not been so fortunate. A number of roadblocks have prevented some from signing up, including paperwork.
The story of Camden resident Fatimah Shakir highlights this problem. The mother of three students in Camden area schools, not all of her children were initially accepted to receive free meals at school due to a paperwork error, The Courier-Post reported. While the issue was later sorted out, one of Shakir's offspring spent weeks without getting a substantive free meal.
To eliminate this undue hardship, the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act allows all qualifying students to get free meals even if the right paperwork is not on file. This has been huge in Camden, as the number of students getting free lunch has recently gone up 7 percent. This means that around 70 percent of pupils in Camden schools get this critical meal provided at no charge to them, The Courier Post reported.
Considering that being well-fed goes a long way toward helping a student pay attention in class, this boost is huge for the schools and the community. Research done in the U.K. recently showed that students who get free lunch perform dramatically better academically versus their peers who don't get it, and the No Kid Hungry campaign found that pupils did better at math and spent more time at school when they got free breakfast.
"The program's something we're really proud of," said Brendan Lowe, Camden City schools spokesman, according to The Courier-Post. "We've been working hard to make sure more kids in Camden eat healthy meals and eat more of them."
By eliminating paperwork, one school district was able to feed more hungry kids.Can Camden's success be duplicated elsewhere?
A big reason why Camden was able to boost participation rates in this key program and better serve area students was because it no longer required paperwork for kids to qualify. Not having to deal with physical forms is a dream of all school clerks and administrators, although it's not one that will likely come true anytime soon. While schools may no longer need paperwork to give students free meals, they still need physical documentation for just about everything else, from medical documentation to test scores and even some grades.
"For schools looking to reduce paperwork, FoIP is the way to go."
This puts schools in between a rock and a hard place, so to speak. On one hand, they want to eliminate paperwork and know that doing so can make operations much smoother. On the other hand, failure to follow the law could lead to major fines or even identity theft. So what is a school to do? The answer is simply to adopt FoIP.
How FoIP can come to the rescue for the nation's schools
An acronym for fax over IP, FoIP enables schools to remain compliant and eliminate paperwork. With a cloud-based fax to email solution, administrators can send and receive forms and documents digitally if desired, eliminating manual data entry and all the headaches that come with it. When everything is stored in the cloud, it is more readily accessible and easier to deal with. But, since FoIP is still relying on faxing technology to a degree, it is much safer and more reliable than just email alone.
"[F]axing has continued to allow for specialist transmissions, such as sending legal documents with signatures via a protocol or encrypted fax service which guarantees to a high degree of certainty that the message has not been tampered with," BBC contributor Chris Baraniuk recently wrote. "Also, one benefit of faxing over email continues to be the simple fact that the sender is notified when their document has been successfully received. There are no spam folders on fax machines."
For schools looking to safely reduce the amount of paperwork handled in order to more effectively serve students, a FoIP solution with cloud-based fax to email capabilities is the way to go. Such an option can enable any district to see benefits similar to what Camden experienced when the elimination of the former paperwork burden enabled many new students to receive critical free meals. Many schools across the country have realized many benefits from FoIP, and now is an ideal time to make such an upgrade.
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