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Canon Solutions America - 1/4/2006
Océ Helps Texas School District Integrate Students Displaced by
Hurricane Katrina
Océ announced that with the help of the Océ Special Education Platform (OSEP), the Mansfield Independent
School District (MISD) in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area was able to integrate in just one week 200 special needs
students displaced by Hurricane Katrina. As a result, the students were able to continue their developmental
programs with minimal interruption.
OSEP is a flexible, automated environment that eliminates tedious manual processes associated with
administration of Individual Education Plans (IEPs) and other Special Education documents. IEPs must be
created, managed, updated and distributed among every classroom teacher, Special Education teacher and
stakeholder for every child several times a year. This process creates a document management nightmare and
poses a serious administrative burden for school systems, with no guarantee of compliance or confidentiality.
OSEP solved these problems for MISD.
Like most public school systems, the MISD Special Education department primarily used paper forms to capture,
archive and distribute IEPs. "We were generating a ream of paper per child per year," said Special Education
Director for MISD, Jane Melms. "When you consider that we serve 2,500 special needs children, with more
coming in every day, the amount of paperwork is staggering."
"The MISD Special Education team was able to minimize paperwork, reduce the time to get IEPs to
stakeholders, and enable a smoother transition for children transferring in and out of the district, including the
influx of displaced students," said Joyce Virnich, vice president of marketing for Océ Digital Document Systems.
MISD had just completed phase I of their document management implementation at the end of August, 2005,
with back-file conversion of some 650,000 existing documents. MISD documents that required a roomful of file
drawers could be stored on a hard drive small enough to fit in the palm of one hand. Day-forward scanning is
handled by an Océ VarioPrint 2060 multi-functional system. After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast,
the district was able to quickly assimilate IEP documents for 200 more Special Education students displaced
by the storm.
The OSEP project had already begun to pay for itself even before the unexpected influx of additional students.
MISD saves money by improving staff efficiency and productivity and redeploying two employees to high-value
tasks. Before, when a request for documents came in from another school or district, the records manager
would have to queue the request, pull the documents, photocopy them and package them for mailing without
timely receipt confirmation. Now staff can locate documents and email them immediately, complete with
acknowledgment of receipt. "We can now search an entire million-page, indexed repository through a browser
rather than physically searching through paper documents. And the images appear much cleaner than our old
paper documents," said Melms. "When you're growing at a 10 percent clip and don't have to hire new
employees to keep pace, the result is measurable cost savings. With the Océ program, we can now spend
more time concentrating on the children."
www.csa.canon.com
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