School Districts Save Money with Online Calendar

When outside groups such as the Boy Scouts of America wanted to rent facilities in Hopewell-Loudon Local School District, they would have to do a lot of work, and so would district board secretary Jan Brickner.

Boy Scout leaders would come to the Bascom, Ohio, office to pick up an application, take it home, fill it out and mail it back. Then Brickner would approve it, make copies for everyone who needed to know about the request and have someone in the accounting office create an invoice.

But now, they rent their facilities online and schedule activities through Tandem for Schools, a Software as a Service application that makes the process more efficient and profitable for K-12 school districts. With the facilities scheduling feature that was released last week, she'll be able to send one e-mail off to everyone who needs to know what's going on and send an invoice out in the Web-based application.

“There was just no order to it," Brickner said. "With this new module, I can keep it all in one place.”

The district has saved money by eliminating paper and postage costs. And in one place, they can keep track of who did something, what it costs and who should be charged. That saves time Brickner can spend somewhere else.

Now that the facility availability and rates are online, people who aren't affiliated with the schools can see that they can rent facilities instead of just hearing about it by word of mouth.

In Lake Washington School District, the facilities department hasn't switched over to the new module yet, but it has been cutting costs by scheduling school events through the calendar. Until last year, parents received a glossy, printed calendar with district-wide events. With recent budget cuts, the 50 schools near Redmond, Wash., decided to save the paper, postage and time that went into making them.

They had just developed new district and school Web sites that had a consistent look, and they wanted the same consistency for their online calendars. The calendar application allowed them to have a central location where everyone could see what was going on across the district on the district site, and on the school sites, they would see the events for that school.

Previously, junior high and high schools in the same area might schedule the end-of-the-year band concert on the same night, which made it tough for parents who had kids in different grades. That doesn't happen anymore.

“For us, it’s not only a money-saver because we’re not printing those nice glossy calendars like we were, but it’s also been a real scheduling conflict saver," said Shannon Parthemer, community relations and communications coordinator. "We don’t seem to have those same scheduling conflicts that we had before.”