Henrico County Public Schools (HCPS) in Virginia has a simple vision: “The right to achieve. The support to succeed.” This message guides educators and administrators at HCPS’s 75 schools and program centers.
Henrico County Gifted Programs, one of the departments within HCPS, provides students with educational opportunities that meet their needs and match their abilities. Led by gifted education specialist Jenna Conlee, the department identifies roughly 3,000 gifted students each year.
When a paper workflow for identifying gifted students became unwieldy and time-consuming, Conlee turned to Jotform Enterprise. Her new digital workflow eliminates needless back and forth among staff, saving them one and a half hours per student. That’s the equivalent of 112 workweeks.
“I would highly recommend Jotform Enterprise,” Conlee says, “the time savings, all of the features, all of the integrations, all of the things it can do — it’s absolutely incredible.”
Henrico County Public Schools case study results at a glance
112 workweeks saved by switching to Jotform Enterprise
Migrating the gifted student identification process to an online form saved staff and teachers thousands of hours.
3,000 form responses into one Google Sheet
The Google Sheets integration auto-populates a sheet with responses to the gifted student identification form. Staff can then easily send the sheet to 59 different schools.
100% faster e-signature collection
Jotform Sign documents are easy to share and track, and parents return them twice as fast as paper forms.
A paper workflow that had to go
After students are nominated for the gifted program by staff members, parents, or a universal screener, Henrico County Gifted Programs uses a teacher perception inventory to further evaluate them. The teacher perception inventory contains 19 general attributes, plus an English and math assessment.
Before Jotform Enterprise, the inventory was tallied on paper, which made it difficult to track data and keep it secure.
“It was rough,” Conlee says. “For the teachers involved and the identification coordinators, just a lot of back and forth. Putting a hard copy in people’s mailboxes, waiting to get it back, not being sure if you got it back or not, tracking the documents.”
Conlee moved the teacher perception inventory to an online form she built with Jotform Enterprise. The form automatically tallies perception inventory scores from teachers. She can set up automatic reminder emails, and she has complete visibility into incoming data through Jotform Tables.
“With Jotform, we can send out reminders and be sure that we’ve got everybody,” Conlee says. “I love the search features within Jotform Tables. If I’m looking for one student or one staff member — poof — I can see everything that’s been entered about the student or done by the teacher within Jotform. It saves us a ton of time.”
I would highly recommend Jotform Enterprise — the time savings, all of the features, all of the integrations, all of the things it can do — it’s absolutely incredible.
Jenna Conlee, Gifted Education Specialist, Henrico County Public Schools
The new gifted student workflow eliminated the need for printed documents, manual reminders, manual data entry, and more. It also keeps student information secure and makes data storage and analysis easy.
When Conlee built her form, the Jotform Enterprise Customer Success team guided her along the way, saving her even more time.
“I’ve had support go into my form and tell me exactly what I need to do to have the form add up the points in a particular section. I’m not a technology person per se, so that was really, really helpful. That’s definitely something that y’all excel at. If we ask for help, we get answers pretty immediately.”
Getting more done with Jotform Enterprise
After improving the gifted student identification workflow, Conlee and her staff discovered more ways to automate with Jotform Enterprise. HCPS captures digital signatures using Jotform Sign, creates reports with Jotform Report Builder, sends submission data to third-party software through integrations, and more.
Having complete control over data is vital for HCPS. After perception inventory forms are submitted, the data is sent directly to the organization’s Google Drive. This makes it easy for the data team to perform data norming and analysis at the district and national level.
“We use integrations like Google Sheets,” Conlee says. “We’ll get 3,000 responses to a form and disseminate [the sheet of responses] to 47 different elementary schools and 12 middle schools. Jotform Enterprise works so nicely with the platforms we use in our district.”
HCPS uses Jotform Sign to create documents for parents. It’s easy for Conlee to create a signable document and share it via the school system’s parent messaging app of choice, ParentSquare. All she has to do is copy and paste the document link into the app.
“We need a parent signature on our code of conduct and on our middle school handbook that we send out. The fact that they can do that within the form is really helpful.” According to Conlee, e-signature forms are returned roughly twice as fast as paper forms used to be.
Conlee has eliminated needless busywork from a variety of parent-teacher workflows, and other departments at HCPS have taken notice.
“It’s really eased a lot of the back and forth of paper copies that we relied upon in the past for everything from bus transportation permissions to registrations,” she says. “It has saved us quite a bit of time. There’s definitely been some attention paid from other departments at Henrico. They say, ‘Oh, this is working really well.’ ”
For example, five different programs within Henrico County Public Schools now use Jotform Enterprise for transportation registration.
“Our transportation department used a Google Form in the past, which failed miserably a couple of years ago,” Conlee says. “Now, we’ll draft a message in ParentSquare and link the Jotform for transportation there. Parents are able to access it, complete it, then sign it and get it back to us.”
Easing educator workloads
Switching to digital workflows with Jotform Enterprise has made life easier for teachers at HCPS. They now have more time for students.
“I think teachers have really appreciated the change because it’s a lot easier for them,” Conlee says. “It’s our responsibility not to overburden our teachers. That’s the most important thing of all.”
Conlee remembers workflows at HCPS before Jotform Enterprise, and she’s happy those days are behind her. “Using Jotform Enterprise saves us so much time. It makes things a lot easier for everyone.”
Additionally, Jotform Enterprise’s security capabilities, such as local data residency and features that enable compliance with FERPA, provide vital benefits for Conlee and her staff.
“We like that Jotform Enterprise is a secure environment for our data to be going back and forth. Google Forms makes me a little nervous sometimes,” Conlee says. “Of course we are under FERPA, FOIA, etc., so knowing that we’re able to use [Jotform Enterprise] with peace of mind is a huge added benefit.
“I can use Google Forms for free. But the cost associated with Jotform Enterprise is well worth it — I don’t know of a better, cheaper way. I don’t think it exists.”
More time for learning at Henrico County Public Schools
After going digital with Jotform Enterprise, Conlee and other school staff have more time to spend with students. They joined the education field because of their passion for helping young people. Unnecessary paperwork is a nuisance they’ve now moved past.
Conlee says that providing relief for teachers while helping students, “feels great. When we first moved from paper forms to Jotform, the teachers were very pleased.” Because the forms are online, teachers “can access them at school, at home, wherever they are, on their phone. It saves them a lot of time in terms of follow-up and organization. That’s priceless.”
Using Jotform Enterprise saves us so much time. It makes things a lot easier for everyone.
Jenna Conlee, Gifted Education Specialist, Henrico County Public Schools
Want to explore similar benefits for your organization? Learn more about Jotform Enterprise’s education solutions, and discover how you can transform your school, department, or district.
Photo by Pavel Danilyuk
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