Top 25 Operational Workflows Digitized by NYC Schools in Forms & Flows

Across New York City, SchoolStatus Forms & Flows is being used to automate family, staff, and student processes, digitalizing management for over 200 operational workflows in K-12 schools and districts.

Below are the top 25 paper and people reliant workflows we’ve helped automate, empowering you to stop wasting resources on operational inefficiencies and, instead, focus every minute and every dollar possible on student education:

1. Digital Blue Cards

Ensure you have the latest medication information and emergency contact details, for all your students, at your fingertips—anywhere, anytime, on any device.

With Forms & Flows, families complete a digital Blue Card Form once, quickly update it whenever information changes, with staff able to immediately access that updated Blue Card data on any device or platform.

Authorized staff are also immediately alerted when changes are made, so you’re never caught off-guard.

2. Field Trip Management

3. OP 175 and Per Session Time Sheet

Set up Per Session Timesheets and Apply for Comp Time Positions, then manage associated approval workflows, 100 percent digitally using Forms & Flows. Ensure overtime submissions are easy to complete and easy to fulfill, reducing stress on administrative staff and your hard-working teachers alike.

4. Backpack Letters

Never struggle with lost and crumpled backpack letters again. Forms & Flows helped digitally distribute over 40 Chancellor’s Letters to the families of NYCDOE schools with a single click.

SchoolStatus Forms & Flows is an integrated add-on to SchoolStatus Connect, which enables you to digitize everything from school-based letters, updates from the principal, classroom updates, and back-to-school announcements. The SchoolStatus platform makes it easy to collect digital signatures and acknowledgments from families for any document: Attendance, Promotion in Doubt, and Summer School Letters.

5. Staff Reimbursement Requests

Now you can consolidate your payment and form-based processes in a seamless digital workflow: From AP Exam Payments, Uniform Purchasing, collecting Senior Dues, submitting Staff Reimbursement Requests, or integrating payment requests within Field Trip Consent Forms.

6. Digital Registration and Onboarding

Automate your most important start-of-year processes and the associated workflows, data collation, tracking, and analysis: from the distribution and collection of forms and Blue Cards, to manual data wrangling and communicating with prospective families, to onboarding new and returning students. Discover how to eliminate data double-handling by instantly mapping Forms & Flows to official DOE PDF templates. And, use data-based triggers—to automate student onboarding requests upon enrollment—in order to remove registration bottlenecks.

See how PS8 The Emily Warren Roebling School in Brooklyn streamlined operations to keep pace with NYCDOE compliance requirements, keep students safe and engaged, and keep the school’s resources and staff focused on achieving excellent educational outcomes.

7. Consent Forms

Drive higher and faster response rates for all permission requests by digitally delivering signable eForms straight to your families’ cell phones, including Media Consent, Walking Home, COVID Testing, Early Leave Requests, and more.

See how upstate’s Warwick Valley Central School District is saving staff hours, engaging families, and increasing its intake with a fully automated and integrated registration process.

8. Health Attestations

Schools and districts across the U.S. are using Forms & Flows’ Health Checks and Recurring eForms to automate daily health screenings, safety protocols, and blended learning arrangements in one digital, mobile-ready, workflow. You can also Trigger Actions to instantly distribute follow-up communications. Learn more about how you can embrace automation to help focus your time, energy, and resources on what matters most: ensuring strong student learning outcomes.

9. School-Based Health Center Packets

School-based Health Centers (SBHCs) provide independent on-site care to students at no cost to families. They’re an enormously beneficial resource. However, for families, signing up their children can be an arduous task. We work with NYC schools to digitize their SBHC onboarding packets and automate the entire process, ensuring all children have the opportunity to access quality healthcare for free.

10. Teacher Preference Sheets

When preparing for the next school year, it’s critical to find out what teachers want to teach: from subjects and grade levels, to classes, team teaching, and any other program preferences. With Forms & Flows, designing, distributing, and collecting feedback sheets or surveys is a breeze.

Plus, you can easily track completed responses and quickly identify staff members who are lagging behind. Forms & Flows even aggregates results in a spreadsheet for review.

11. Student Contracts

Automatically distribute student policies, agreements, and contracts to families or students—from Cell Phone, Safety, or Discipline Contracts, to Internet Usage Agreements—so that everyone can hit the ground running in September.

We’ve been working with districts and schools across NYC to digitize the distribution, collection, and tracking of all student contracts, as part of their start-of-year onboarding workflows.

12. ELL Management and Support Documentation

Our school communities are becoming more multicultural. Over 10% of the 55 million K–12 public school students in the U.S. come from emergent bilingual families. SchoolStatus Connect eliminates language barriers with automatic two-way translation in over 130 languages, ensuring everyone receives important school information in their home language.

Forms & Flows provides essential support for all families by making it easy to digitally access English Learner Family Surveys and related documentation and services. Deliver this content directly to their cell phones, where they can automatically receive communications in their preferred language.

13. School Lunch Forms

The NYCDOE mandates that School Lunch Forms be collected by the end of October each year. Critically, schools depend on receiving these completed forms from families in order to secure Title 1 Funding.

Forms & Flows helps schools digitize these forms and distribute them straight to families’ cell phones, driving significantly higher and faster response rates. SchoolStatus partners have reported receiving 100% of their lunch forms back, at record pace, without any manual follow-up.

14. Opt Out Forms

Managing exclusions from school programs and services often demands continuous oversight. By digitizing standard Opt-Out Forms and integrating them with dynamic group management in Forms & Flows, schools can automate the collection of these forms and the ongoing segmentation of applicable students—whether for Military, Media, or other opt-out categories.

15. Medication Administration Forms

Once your school receives a completed student Blue Card, subsequent information often needs to be requested based on the medical conditions identified—from asthma to anaphylaxis.

16. HR, Payroll, and Policy Management

Managing staff capacity and competing priorities places significant recurring administrative demand on schools. From OP 198 and 201 Forms to Unused Sick Time Transfers, and more. Automating all your HR and payroll forms and associated workflows in Forms & Flows means your school can put administrative resources to better use.

Forms & Flows also empowers you to automate the creation, distribution, and collection of all new policies in one place. Easily track responses, and include an acknowledgment button or mandatory signature field to ensure compliance with any policy update.

Set automated follow-ups and reminders to receive higher completion rates in less time: from acknowledging and complying with new school guidelines and Chancellor’s Regulations to submitting Teacher Self Reflection Surveys.

17. Request Management

Requests are always being made of your school from both staff and families. With Forms & Flows, not only can you digitize these application processes, but automated workflows ensure approvals can be managed seamlessly too. Easily replace your manual, multi-app, or paper-based process.

On the staff side, room, supply purchase, photocopying, and PA announcements are just some of the routine requests to be managed. For students, course selection is a prime example. Receive student course preferences within minutes—not days or weeks. Easily route responses to the right place at the right time—to the Grade Advisor or Careers Counselor, Assistant Principal, and Program Chair—to avoid unnecessary scheduling delays. And, trigger follow-up actions based on submissions received, such as the distribution of student contracts, onboarding documents, handbooks, school fees and more.

We’ve worked with schools across NYC and the U.S. to automate hundreds of staff workflows, including requests for teacher support, copy center applications, PA announcements, room reservations, and more.

18. Tech Support and Custodial Request Ticketing

Organizing and tracking all your technical support requests can be hard at the best of times. And, if staff and students are working from home, you need a robust mechanism for managing your support ticket processes online—from start to finish.

Effortlessly set up an end-to-end digital workflow to ensure nothing falls through the cracks—from logging, categorizing, resolving, and communicating the progress of support tickets submitted by families, students, and staff alike. Easily route support tickets to appropriate staff, while tracking each one being approved and managed.

19. Senior Dues and Activity Management

As students progress into senior year levels, it’s increasingly common for schools to request and collect payments for a range of services, products, and activities: from Senior Dues to uniform purchases and prom tickets.

Managing this workflow manually can get tricky. SchoolStatus is working with schools to automate these student payment requests: from the initial distribution of digital forms to integrated online payments, as well as form submission and tracking. Forget chasing students for overdue payments and manually reconciling paper forms against physical payments.

20. AP Exam Registration and Payment

AP Exam registration and payment is a perfect example of a large-scale recurring school process. Most schools still persist with physical sign-up sheets and accept a range of payment options, which are most often submitted separately.

Integrate AP Exam registration submissions and payments into one digital workflow and eliminate the need to manually manage the process.

21. Daily Announcements and Text Messaging

SchoolStatus Forms & Flows is fully integrated with the SchoolStatus Connect messaging platform, allowing you to effortlessly ensure families are informed and engaged with SMS, push notifications, and email communications, which are accessible anywhere and anytime.

22. Family-Teacher Conference Management and Appointment Scheduling

Coordinating family-teacher interviews is a logistical nightmare, but with SchoolStatus Connect, you can leave the chaos behind. Digitally deliver conference booking information directly to families’ cell phones, track scheduled appointments in real-time, and automatically notify teachers when an appointment is logged. Through SchoolStatus Connect you can streamline your scheduling process, making it more efficient and hassle-free.

23. Events, After School Club, and Extracurricular Program Registration

School programs, activities, and events require strong family engagement and student participation to be sustainable and successful. But, awkward, time-consuming, and manual sign-up processes often get in the way. That’s why schools across NYC are streamlining the associated registration, payments, and Blue Card verification processes in integrated digital workflows.

24. 408 Verification and IEP Management Sign-Offs

Individual Education Plans (IEPs) are essential to help map and monitor a student’s unique learning needs. However, completing the associated documentation and getting the IEP approved can be slow and cumbersome.

With Forms & Flows, you can distribute all IEP documents to families and staff digitally, embedding automated approval workflows to ensure each person can quickly complete and sign off on the plan.

25. Contactless Visitor Check-Ins

Knowing who’s in your school buildings has never been more important. When visitors enter the building and need a form, point them to your QR code wall. Using their smartphone’s camera, users can scan our generated QR codes and automatically open forms on their mobile devices.

Together, SchoolStatus Forms & Flows Public eForms and QR Code recognition capabilities enable you to facilitate contact-free submission for any form type, from anybody—not just school staff and registered families.