Piled-in closets and offices throughout the district are boxes of records of every past students and employees. According to Superintendent Barbara Underwood, the district is required to keep all of its old paperwork and as the district continues to grow, a problem has occurred in lack of storage space and organization for these records.

“We have been for years very concerned about storage of records because we have to keep students’ files forever,” Underwood said. 

There is a solution though. Underwood said that after looking into many options and struggling for at least three years to find a way to manage all of the papers, the board has finally decided on a company who stores records for many universities and companies to store the records. The company the district is hiring is Cintas.

Cintas has several locations, one being over near the airport, which Underwood said was impressive.

“They actually organize them and index them into the computer,” she said. If a past student wants to find a copy of a transcript that is a paper copy in 10 years, then this company will look it up in the computer and find their name and then find the paper transcript and send a copy. Beginning with the current year, the company would just digitize the records and destroy the paper copy.

Currently if a person who has been gone from the high school five years calls, it will take some time to find the record.

This program is also relatively inexpensive as compared to other ideas that the board has looked into during the past few years. One such idea that was struck down was to add a building on to the administrative offices.

“The cost is very reasonable,” Underwood said. “The first year will be the most expensive because they have to organize and index. That will be $15,000. That comes out of our CPS fund anyway, so it’s not out of our general fund,” she said. In subsequent years it will be about $5,000 per year.

Underwood said, “We are excited. That was a big deal for us.”