After 12 years of scanning and shredding 16,500 student files, an employee of the Davenport Community School District met her goal of going completely paperless. While Linda Zurborg’s original plan was to create a paperless school district in less than a decade, she has officially turned all the paper files into digital documents as of this week.
Zurborg was hired by the Iowa school district 13 years ago and made it her mission to go paperless. She first had to travel to each school to collect bags worth of files, cleaning out 85 filing cabinets and 300 boxes of files in the school district office alone, along with filing cabinets in each school. Some of the documents dated back to the late 1800s. For six months, four temporary employees scanned all the current school documents before the last were shredded this month. With the new paperless school records system, all files can be accessed through the district’s computer system, according to the Quad-City Times.
Not only does this cut back on space, as the filling cabinets are no longer needed, but all information can now be emailed between schools or other districts. This change also means schools will save money on mailing and printing costs each year.
While the effects of going paperless will help the district become more efficient in the future, there are other ways to achieve this goal in less than 12 years. Partnering with a bulk scanning service can help paper-heavy offices become a paperless one in a matter of weeks or months, not years, and receive the benefits as quickly as possible.
Tab Service Company is a Chicago based company with over 53 years of experience as a data processing service provider. We provide business with outsourcing solutions for document scanning services, data entry services and mailing/lettershop services. As a SOC2-approved service organization, we apply industry-best practices to our approach with clients.