Case Study: Clark County

June 16, 2022

Scribbles Supports Clark County with Electronic Records for 300,000+ Students

“Everything Scribbles does in the document management world is encrypted... We figure if it's good enough for national security, it's probably good enough for student records."

 

Fast Facts

Enrollment: 309,000 students

Operates 368 school programs in 341 facilities

Home to more than 41,000 staff

CCSD educates 64% of the students in Nevada

Monthly revenue generated through Scribbles: ~$23,000

Scribbles Solutions used: ScribOrder, ScribTransfer, ScribOnline, ScribChain

 

 

 

Clark County School District is the nation's fifth-largest school district serving more than 309,000 students. The district’s mission is “All students progress in school and graduate prepared to succeed and contribute in a diverse global society.” Much of that success relies on the behind-the-scenes work of district administration, and with that many students, that’s quite a bit of student records processing–even more when considering former students. When the COVID-19 pandemic presented a barrier to records processing within their school community, CCSD knew they must act swiftly to continue to serve their constituents. The closing of offices all around the country put a special strain on large school districts, like CCSD, that had previously been processing hundreds of in-person records requests a day.

 

One of the bright spots during this difficult time was the way Scribbles came through for districts that found themselves scrambling to keep up with paper-dense records requests. Shortly after the first round of closures, we sat down with Greg Manzi, director of student record services for Clark County School District in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Ron Christian, Scribbles Software President, to discuss how things were going and what Scribbles did to keep the records department up and running, even from clerks' homes.

 

How did Scribbles step in to help during school closures?

Greg Manzi: We had two really important questions about what we are going to be doing: How do we support schools through the closures, and how do we support our customers with the department being closed? Since we couldn't respond face to face anymore, we decided to go totally paperless. Just being able to continue our operations this way was one of the hardest challenges we faced, but Scribbles Software was there to help us with ScribOrder and ScribOnline. One of the key features of ScribOrder was for us to put up our vacation notice and let people know how we were going to operate without face-to-face services. Even without being near the regular office machines [like our printers], we can still search for students who are trying to get into college and trying to get into a job or the military.

 

How does that work?

Ron Christian: I say no printer, no problem. If we need to send an official document, say to a student or to a university, we can do it all through Scribbles Software. We might, for example, have to print an order from any application. Rather than sending it to the printer, you just send it to the ScribOrder driver and print to ScribOrder to prepare that record to be sent electronically.

 

Let's say you download a file from SIS. We can upload that right into ScribOrder as if it were printed, all with a simple drag-and-drop. That creates a PDF within the application and prepares it to be signed and sent to the requester of that information, whether that be a university, the military, or a law firm. You also have the ability to electronically send an unofficial transcript to your students. We say it's more secure than paper, and it truly is. Everything we do in Scribbles in terms of document protection is encrypted using AES-256 encryption, which means it's stamp proof. It creates a blue ribbon certificate on that document.

 

That PDF becomes a verifiable transcript that is sent then to the recipient who digitally signed it with a seal or logo and a cover sheet. It says exactly what it is, and who signed it, and it has a seal to authenticate it. Everything we do in terms of signing and sending and securely is looking at the security of that record to make sure that it's an authentic record that is secured and sent to the person we intend.

 

How has your community responded to the new way of processing records?

GM: Our community has been receptive to this new way of getting the records. We work really closely with our partners and some of the people that we hear from on a regular basis to ensure that they understand the process and know the different features that are available to them. We're actually way more efficient processing this way. So they definitely appreciate the speed at which we can process requests and get back to them.

 

How does the blockchain relate to electronic records?

RC: The Scribbles Blockchain provides a secure digital record of the student record creation, the ownership, and the validity of that record. This is much more secure than paper or the old way of storing a record in a database because of the way the blockchain is set up. It's much more secure than even a normal database. It positions you to be able to provide that student access to their own record so they could have control of it. So everything we do in the Scribbles world today we're logging the transaction in the blockchain. 

 

Can you share more about the security of our electronic records?

RC: We throw a lot of acronyms around Like AES 256-bit encryption, which is a Department of Defense-standard encryption algorithm commonly used in document management. Everything Scribbles does in the document management world is encrypted this way. We figure if it's good enough for national security, it's probably good enough for student records. What we do is run Scribbles through a SOC 2 audit, which means we have a third party that reviews our people, our process, and our technology to see how we're using our software. They check on whether we have the right policies in place for data protection and information classification, and what our policy is in the event of a breach.

 

Will you continue this process even when we’re face-to-face again?

GM: Yes–I think we're looking at enhancing the way that we do paperless delivery of documents and really limiting our face-to-face contact and what we do in terms of mail out. We're trying to be more responsive and operate more efficiently and secure the documents by using electronic release instead.

 

 

If your district is ready to go paperless, make records more accessible to students and families, and even generate revenue, fill out the form below to contact our team today.