When communicating with families, sending notifications and updates is only a small fraction of what a school-home communication platform can do. One of the additional features ParentSquare offers is secure document delivery, which allows schools, administrators, and teachers to securely send home important documents that contain student information.
Secure document delivery makes it easy and efficient to send important documents to parents and students, including progress reports, report cards, letters regarding academics and extracurriculars, and anything containing students’ personal information. In contrast to sending physical documents home with students, sending digital versions through your school-home communication platform ensures that the documents are always sent directly to parents or guardians. Plus, ParentSquare collects delivery statistics, allowing schools to confirm that parents have both received and seen critical documents.
In a recent webinar, a panel of K-12 leaders discussed how they use secure document delivery including Caroline Chapman, Director of Communication and Advisement at Canandaigua City Schools (NY), Candice Cheng, Information Technologies Coordinator at Brentwood Union Free School District (NY), Christine Jordan, Ed.D., Assistant to the Superintendent for Administrative & Instructional Accountability at Wyandanch Union Free School District (NY), and Dewitte Wilson, Programmer Analyst at Hampton City Schools (VA).
CAROLINE CHAPMAN
“It really drove up the number of people participating in ParentSquare and also allowed us to have that oversight of who had been opening things.”
—Caroline Chapman, Canandaigua City Schools
Saving Time and Money
For many of the panelists, the initial switch to digital secure document delivery through ParentSquare was a way to save time and money when sending out recurrent documents like progress reports and report cards.
“We were already using ParentSquare for a while, and it had great adoption,” Dewitte said. “We were looking for a way to cut down on our postage fees and cut back on the amount of manpower it takes to send printed report cards, so it just seemed like the natural thing to go to ParentSquare and use the secure documents feature.”
Using ParentSquare for progress reports and report cards also helps to solve the problem of the documents never reaching parents, whether that’s because students forget or because incorrect contact information results in undelivered or returned mailings.
In Christine’s district, sending out documents by mail could take up to two days, and after all that time, up to 25 percent of the documents would be returned due to errors in the mailing addresses that were on file. With secure document delivery, sending these documents using digital templates can take under 30 minutes; plus, there’s the added benefit of delivery statistics to be certain that parents are receiving and opening the documents.
Candice also noted the benefit of authentication to view secure documents, which helps ensure privacy since only the recipients of these documents can access them. With this security feature, parents don’t have to worry about having someone else view or mark documents as read, since the notification they receive is directly for their password-protected account.
Creative Ways to Use Secure Documents
Some of the most common ways to use secure document delivery are to send progress reports, report cards, and class schedules to parents and students. The webinar panelists also highlighted other essential documents they send through ParentSquare.
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Wyandanch Union Free School District also uses secure documents to send bus passes (routes, pickup times, and locations) and English Language Learner (ELL) placement documents and orientation letters. By sending bus passes through ParentSquare, it’s easy to update families if routes or schedules change. ELL documents sent through ParentSquare are more accessible to multilingual families, and parents can easily ask questions through the platform’s messaging with two-way translation.
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Hampton City Schools sends letters about graduation requirements, Advanced Placement courses, and other academic matters through ParentSquare.
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Brentwood Union Free School District sends academic intervention letters and welcome packets for different programs, such as summer academies, athletics, or extracurricular activities. These documents often contain sensitive information.
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Canandaigua School District uses secure document delivery for anything that contains students’ personal information or their student number, including surveys, Honor Roll letters, eligibility letters for extracurricular activities, and student schedules.
“We wanted less tools and less things to send to our families, so by using ParentSquare for other things––along with the report card delivery––it really drove up the number of people participating in ParentSquare and also allowed us to have that oversight of who had been opening things,” Caroline said.
The webinar also included a greater discussion on why secure documents are such an essential tool to have in a school-home communication platform, as well as a demonstration of the secure document delivery feature in ParentSquare from Engagement Specialist Tony Williams. To view and listen to the conversation in its entirety, check out the webinar recording here.
