KWizCom Forms deployed to provide The Family Support Liaison Program’s workers intuitive and speedy data entry/retrieval forms, while at the same time ensuring that access to sensitive fields/views is given to authorized personnel only.
Christ the Redeemer Catholic Schools is a publicly funded School Division serving almost 9,000 students in 16 schools, spanning the entire Province of Alberta. It also serves students around the world through the Centre for Learning@HOME.
The Customer
The Family Support Liaison Program (FSLP) is a free, school-based, confidential service which partners with Parents and School Personnel to collaboratively enhance a child’s social, emotional, behavioral and academic functioning throughout the academic year. FSLP puts a special emphasis on prevention and early intervention, utilizing classroom presentations, consultations, community resource referrals and counseling. This program is made possible by a funding partnership of the following entities: The Student Health Initiative, Christ the Redeemer School Division, Family and Community Support Services, Child and Family Services Authority-Region 3, and United Way, Okotoks.
The Challenge
FSLP workers in 16 schools were each keeping paper records of each contact with students in the program. Files were not available to the program director, located at the Head Office. Decisions regarding students’ well-being require phone consultations and records faxed to the Program Director. With confidentiality being of the utmost concern, this was not an acceptable or efficient method of coordinating strategies to assist students. In addition, since the Program is funded by a variety of community agencies, statistical reports are required, often in different formats and also, retention regulations require that the records are securely stored for as long as 25 years.
Working with SharePoint, the initial plan was to use separate InfoPath Forms for Referral, Intake and Case Notes and other forms, and to create a separate list in order to manually enter stats. The process was cumbersome, far too time consuming and FSLP workers were struggling to keep both the forms and the stat lists up-to-date.
The Solution
KWizCom Forms was deployed in order to provide FSLP workers a single data entry form to populate all necessary forms, while at the same time ensuring that access to sensitive fields/views is given to authorized personnel only.
KWizCom’s Repeating Rows Field Type (part of KWizCom Forms Enterprise edition) was deployed to document Case Notes, as well as to automatically populate a statistics list, with the option to export as an Excel sheet. This add-on enables the Program Director to easily manipulate and present the stats in the format required by each funding agency. This alone saves weeks of work performed by the Program Director every summer.
͞Our motto of “Leave Not One Heart Behind” permeates all we do. Christ the Redeemer is using SharePoint to facilitate communication, collaboration, reporting and records management between schools located as much as 400km apart. KWizCom Forms and other add-ons made it possible for us to further improve our collaboration and efficiency and at the same time increase our level of privacy,” says Therese O’Brien, Assistan Director of Technology at the Christ the Redeemer Catholic Schools.
Benefits
- Time Saving – By managing the forms and data in SharePoint, substantial time savings have been achieved, and information required for decision making is immediately available to the Program Director.
- Improved Security – Sensitive student data is preserved and the workload of the FSLP workers has been reduced to a more manageable levels, allowing them to focus on their primary role – meeting the needs of the students.
- Increased Efficiency – Automatic archiving and disposition of the records is now possible and a custom user interface makes data entry/retrieval intuitive and speedy.
Future Plans
The FSLP system will be used as a model for a similar initiative, the In School Suspension Program. This program is designed to assist students demonstrating behaviors likely to lead to suspension/expulsion, by providing them early on with one on one counseling in their school setting. The goal of the program is to change the students’ behaviors and attitudes, and reduce the likelihood of a suspension or expulsion from school. SharePoint and KWizCom Professional Services combine to bring increased efficiency to this diverse and innovative organization.
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