How One School Enrolled 350 Students During Covid-19

Finding the Right E-Signing Tool to Register 350 School Students Remotely

Facing a new school year right after the beginning of Covid-19, a secondary school principal and her school administrators were concerned, not just about how they might facilitate remote learning, but how to register their students—remotely.

A quick internet search led the school to finding the right e-signing PDF tool that supported the complete registration process and became a key PDF tool in the day-to-day running of the school's administration. But how did this school manage this first-time remote registration process?

Preparing the Documents

Document preparation for remote student registration amounted to the same effort as before with paper documents. School administrators prepared the documents in digital format as usual and included the following information fields:

1. Name
2. Surname
3. Physical address
4. Emergency contact number
5. Allergies
6. Health insurance details

Ensuring these fields were editable, the document was then uploaded to the eSign tool, ready to be sent out to student parents or guardians to complete and sign.

Requesting Signatures From Parents & Showing Them Where to Sign

Once the enrollment form was uploaded to the eSign tool, teachers or school administrators could simply add the parent's or guardian's email address into the tool prompting them to sign. The "Drag & Drop" feature was used to add a note to the PDF, showing parents where to sign.

After the document was prepared and signees were added, the administrators could send documents for signing. The parents and guardians then received a link to the document, including instructions, to fill in and e-sign the enrollment form. Once signing was complete, everyone involved received a link to download the signed and completed document for safekeeping.

Saving the Signed Documents

As all the enrollment forms were completed and signed by parents and guardians, administrators received real-time notifications, plus a link to the completed documents sent to their email. From here, they could open each document and save it to their desktop or mobile device.

The school in question made use of Dropbox for document storage, which was a seamless process since Smallpdf comes with a Dropbox integration. Other integrations include Google Drive integration, plus a Gmail extension.

Getting parent signatures has always been a challenge for schools and administrative staff and the expectation was that electronic signatures would be no different. It turned out that getting parents to electronically sign documents wasn't just a successful alternative during a pandemic, but a long-term signing solution for the entire school.

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