The Challenge

Located in an historic building across the Hudson from Manhattan, Hoboken New Jersey’s Board of Education (BOE) “records room” was busting at the seams. According to one representative in the guidance office, every time there was a request, she would go into the records room and spend hours trying to find the file in question. If she was unable to find the file, people would persist – needing the information. Not only was productivity being lost, but residents and others requesting information were not being serviced properly. That’s when it became clear it was time to look into a cost-effective alternative to self-storing records.

The Solution

After hearing about FileBank from another New Jersey district, Hoboken’s BOE decided to engage the company as their partner to help them “Jump from Paper.” The BOE’s Human Resources department would be first, since it held archive student records for all six schools in the district and was holding on to records that dated back to the 1920s for students who had not graduated from Hoboken High School, but who had been in the system. Following its FileEdTM Solution designed specifically for the education sector, FileBank sent representatives to the BOE offices to systematically pack, label, and move paper documents into new archive boxes. These new professional storage boxes were bar coded, added into the company system, and delivered to FileBank’s archive center in Oakland, New Jersey. There, inactive files were inventoried and archived; and semi-active files were sorted and stored in the same manner or converted to an electronic file along with current files, so they could be easily accessed by appropriate education offices. Any existing electronic files in the system were also transferred to FileBank, so that all records could be stored and accessed from one common location. Under the new security arrangement with FileBank, records are stored in a climate controlled vault with 24/7 monitoring. This whole process from start to finish took less than three months. Administrators and staff were issued appropriate user and password identification to allow protected access to areas relevant to their individual job function, and all active files became available over the internet. The rest of Hoboken’s departments and schools are also in the process of migrating to FileBank – on a needs-based priority. Hoboken High School, as well as Special Education and Accounting have also migrated to FileBank, and eventually, the staff at Hoboken anticipates being as close to a “paperless” school district as is possible!

The Results

By engaging FileBank’s to deliver its FileEd Solution, Hoboken School District and Board of Education were able to experience the following results: