Prior to summer 2015, the process of putting board meeting agendas in the hands of the board members of Mohawk Local Schools in Sycamore, Ohio, was entirely manual. Administrative Secretary Jackie Messersmith would type up agendas and file them in large binders, which also held agendas and minutes from previous meetings. The binders were then hand-delivered to each board member.
“This took up a lot of the administrative staff’s time, and kept us out of the office often” says Messersmith. “When a change needed to be made, we would have to print addendums and either hand-deliver them or distribute them at the meeting if we did not have enough time to hand-deliver them.”
That meant that unfortunately board members had little or no notice to read those addendums. The administrative office also had its own set of board meeting records stored in those cumbersome binders, taking up a large amount of storage space.
Moving to a paperless solution
In July 2015, Mohawk implemented BoardPaq, an easy-to-use, secure, cloud-based portal for planning, running and managing paperless board meetings. Instead of printing agendas and minutes, digital versions of these documents are written and stored in BoardPaq. The digital solution encourages effective member communication and collaboration before, during and after meetings because it can update in real-time.
BoardPaq helps districts save time and costs associated with printing and couriering board meeting agendas.
“BoardPaq simplifies the voting and minutes portion of meetings” says Messersmith. “I like that we can use iPads during the meeting, and Windows machines for the administrative tasks before and after meetings. It’s really made things a lot easier.”
Completing tasks more efficiently
BoardPaq allows users to save agenda templates, saving time for each meeting.
“Notifications will pop up to show you how to create graphs or charts in BoardPaq. They will also alert you to new features in the platform” says Messersmith. “The notifications are very useful.”
And when Messersmith needs to make a change to an already-deployed agenda, she simply types the new information in BoardPaq. Board members will see these changes in real time, with access to current information each time they log in.
“Our board members are excited that they no longer have to carry around a binder” says Messersmith. “Instead they have up-to-the-minute information wherever they are, on their smartphone, computer or whatever device they use.”
This piece was prepared by District Administration for BoardPaq. For more information, visit www.boardpaq.com
