Blog: Arizona School District Finds a Better Way to Communicate

Fax-based workflows are still a critical part of educational institutions across the U.S. today, and many heavily rely on paper documents to exchange student information, registration forms, and transcript data with parents, colleges, and other outside parties.

One school district in Arizona sought to improve communications and reduce costs associated with faxing. What originally started out as a solution for one school, though, became the districtwide solution to eliminate complex paper workflows and reduce operational costs.

The school system had used legacy fax machines in each school and paid for the analog phone line, which could run as high as $75 per month in some locations. Added to this complexity were the requirements to obtain immunization and health records of students for the school nurse. Health records are not permitted to be emailed to the school system, and under state and federal laws, they are not allowed to be shared with non-authorized personnel. So in order to maintain compliance, district officials were looking to add additional fax lines.

An additional challenge this school district faced – and many across the country constantly face – was the fact that most parents do not have access to fax machines. This created a delay in obtaining the needed forms for students to start school on time and also presented an overall challenge for the entire district to meet government mandates.

This school district sought a comprehensive faxing and secure messaging solution that improves the way educational institutions move and gather data. By enabling cost-effective — and cost-cutting — desktop faxing, integration with multi-function devices (MFD), and secure file sharing functionality, this messaging platform was the modern solution the district sought for its indispensable electronic data and fax-based workflows.

The solution integrates with virtually any MFD and turns any device with scan-to-email capabilities into a fax device. This comprehensive solution integrated fax with secure file sharing and allowed the school district to eliminate legacy fax machines and expensive analog phone lines, improve security, and better enable students.

More than a typical fax server, this modern communication server also allows schools to make voice notification calls with data collection capabilities. This school district, then, can use its notification functionality to easily remind parents via phone or text of parent-teacher meetings, missing permission slips, or even inclement weather notifications, all without any additional cost to the budget.

The modern solution for education, a network fax and messaging platform enables schools to deploy multiple messaging methods and improve communications. Whether sending one message to a large group or an interactive, personalized message to one person, institutions can easily reach their intended audience via phone, secure message, email, text, or fax.