Dive Brief:
- With schools preparing to welcome students back in a matter of weeks, some districts are turning to tech to ease the start-of-the-year scramble to locate key classroom materials and textbooks.
- For example, Consolidated Unit School District 300 in Algonquin, IL, started using a resource management system that was already in place — Follett Learning’s Destiny Resource Manager — to create a physical inventory, plan expenditures, and reallocate resources.
- Additionally, Dallas digitized its textbook tracking and purchasing through a service from Hayes Software Systems that offers real-time data and district-wide access.
Dive Insight:
The start of the school year is often a scramble for administrators and teachers, who must try to ensure that they have all of the tools they need while still working within budgets. When key tools are needed but aren’t available, teachers must often reach into their own pockets to cover the overrun, which cuts into their pay.
There can be impacts on students’ learning, as well. “We’d start a new school year thinking that we had the appropriate supplies for our students, only to find out that our inventory system didn’t reflect what we actually had on hand,” Susan Harkin, the COO of Algonquin's D300, told eSchool News. “Students would start the school year without a textbook to refer to for homework. It wasn’t a good situation for a district that’s focused on student success.”
And there can be costs to districts, too. If the outdated inventory lists an item as out when it isn’t, district administrators may resort to purchasing more when they could have spent the money elsewhere. Harkin estimates that the 21st century inventory saves the district a few hundred thousand dollars a year. She cautions there can be startup costs but that they pay off in the end.
