Automate and Educate: Streamlining School Processes with Automation

Avraham Eliezer Friedman

Schools, like all organizations, stand to benefit from technology’s ability to automate tasks and processes. One well-understood (and yet often ignored) benefit of automation is the improved efficiency achieved by automating common, time-consuming tasks. Automation can also improve accuracy or prevent mistakes from occurring.
There are things which work in small schools or organizations that become unwieldy as the school grows. A Florida man learned the hard way that scaling up an idea can be difficult when he used his warm car to transport frozen iguanas he planned to sell. Unfortunately, the iguanas woke up while he was driving and while he may have been able to deal with one awake iguana in car, a bunch of them were too much and he had to let them all go! Scaling up a successful idea can be difficult, as it can become unmanageable – like driving a car full of iguanas. The solution to this is often automation.
Would you believe that there is a large school in NY that processes millions of dollars on credit cards each year with each payment entered manually? That there is box in the office containing index cards with all the credit card information and the cards are ordered by the date they should be processed. There is someone whose full-time job is to sit there and process credit cards. This is nightmarishly inefficient, error-prone, and an insecure (maybe even illegal?) way to store people’s credit card information.
The second major benefit of automation is accuracy. Besides the time and energy manual processes consume, they are prone to errors. Albert Einstein is misquoted as having said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” In this context we can say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again manually and expecting the same results!
Here are several areas you may not have thought of that could be automated in schools, leading to efficiency and reducing mistakes or oversights:

1. Automated internal emails: Some examples include an email to the person in charge of recruiting every morning with a list of new families who are in the system but have not yet registered. A principal could get an email with a list of students who were marked absent three days in a row. During dinner season, someone in the office could get a daily email each morning listing yesterday’s new dinner reservations.
2. Automated external emails: This could be an email to parents that their child was marked absent today (particularly relevant for high school students who may travel to school on their own), or an alert to a parent that a fee payment will be processed in a few days, or a reminder to parents who indicated on the application that they would be seeking a scholarship but have not yet filled out the scholarship application. Another example is an automated email to a food vendor with updated and last-minute lunch order numbers.
3. Onboarding new employees: Think about all the steps that must take place when a new employee joins the school and try to automate the flow of these processes. If new employees fill out their demographic information into a form, that form could trigger work orders to IT to create an email account and add the new teacher to active directory, automatically input the demographic information into the employee database, alert the payroll department that a new employee was hired, email the new employee whatever payroll department forms need to be filled out, inform the benefits person to add the new person to health insurance, and let the webmaster know to add their picture and bio to the school website. Other steps that may need to occur in a school include printing an ID badge and setting up accounts on the school’s LMS or other systems.
4. Inputting crowdfunding campaign data into your development database: Many schools have an annual crowdfunding campaign and since this donor information is gathered and payment processing done by the campaign platform, many schools never even import this valuable data into the development database, creating a huge development blind spot. Even schools that do import this data often do it later, when the campaign is done. Imagine how great it would be if you had access to this data, in concert with your previous development data, during the campaign? This can be done with all the crowdfunding platforms I know of and is a powerful example of automation at work.
5. Google Apps Manager (GAM): If your school uses Google (for email, Drive, Docs, Classroom, etc.), GAM is a powerful tool used to manage your Google Workspace. It allows you to automate common, often annual, tasks, such as new user creation, user updates (promoting to the next grade or division in the school), changing organizational units, resetting passwords, suspending and re-enabling users, or setting up Google Classrooms for your teachers. Many of these tasks are time consuming and some IT departments spend much of the summer laboring through them manually.
6. Clever: Greatly reduce password reset requests or wasted time due to being unable to access accounts. Teachers can easily log in their entire class of students to various platforms with the use of Badges for younger students or Single Sign-On (SSO) for older students, saving time and effort.
   It’s good to remember that since automation takes time to set up, it’s not worth it for tasks that happen only occasionally, while it greatly increases efficiency for tasks that happen frequently. I would rather spend ten hours learning how to automate a common task that only would have taken me an hour to do manually, since the task needs to be done frequently. However, don’t get carried away automating one-off or rare tasks.
   An interesting organizational question is, who are the right people in a school to make decisions regarding automation? Automation is helpful in many areas of school and educational management, and the people engaged in those areas need to be involved. But I find that it always makes sense for the IT person to be part of the conversation, as he or she often knows what tools are available. Working with other departments, IT pros can help create processes that are automatic and that introduce efficiency into the organization.

Avrohom Eliezer Friedman has been the IT Director at Yeshiva Toras Chaim Toras Emes for over 15 years and is a kidney donor. He is always ready to help solve problems as long as he has a Starbucks in his hand.
Email him at aefriedman@ytcte.org

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