Kyrene School District is one of Arizona’s leading public school districts, providing excellence in education for over 135 years. But like many K-12 school districts with deep roots, many administrative processes haven't changed in decades and are still dominated by paper, manual routing, and limited visibility.
Kyrene is in the early stages of its Softdocs rollout, beginning with a small set of high-impact HR forms.
The district’s vision extends far beyond HR, aiming for a future where critical processes, along with dozens of high-volume, high-visibility workflows, are fully automated, tracked, and accessible in one platform.
Challenges: Managing High-Volume Workflows on Paper
Most forms, whether for new student screenings, teacher absences, or internal HR workflows, are still handled manually. Staff download a PDF from a local drive, print it, fill it out by hand, and send it via district mail or email.
Once completed, the forms have to be scanned and uploaded into Synergy, the district’s student information system (SIS), or manually routed through multiple departments.
This approach surfaces familiar pain points for many districts:
- Time-consuming manual workflows across departments.
- No centralized visibility or tracking, leading to delays or missed steps.
- Data entry inconsistencies, such as missing employee ID numbers.
- Limited audit trails, making compliance tracking more difficult.
For legally required processes like the 45-day screener—an assessment required for every new student within their first 45 days of school to identify potential hearing, vision, behavioral, or learning concerns—that meant relying on hundreds of people across multiple schools to notice concerns, complete forms correctly, and follow through on next steps.
If any part of the chain broke, it could delay support for a student who needed help.
Why Softdocs: Built for K-12 Education, Ready for Scale
Kyrene School District set out to find a platform that could automate and standardize district workflows, reduce paper dependencies, and simplify compliance. The district selected the Softdocs Platform for its flexibility, education-first design, and proven success in K-12 environments.
While the long-term goal includes digitizing the complex state-mandated 45-day screener, the district chose to begin with high-impact HR and absence forms—simpler workflows that could be implemented quickly and deliver immediate results.
This approach allowed staff to see early wins, gain hands-on experience with the platform, and build momentum for larger, more complex projects to follow.
Softdocs now powers:
- Multiple absence forms, including bereavement and blackout day requests.
- Dynamic form autofill, reducing data errors by pulling user-specific info (e.g., employee ID) upon login.
- Automated routing, removing reliance on email or manual handoffs.
- Workflow tracking and notifications, allowing staff to view the status of their submission in real time
- Audit trails, providing clarity for compliance and reporting needs.
- PDF export in official state format, supporting document upload into the SIS.
With the Softdocs Platform, the K-12 district reduced the time it takes to complete a form from up to an hour to just a few minutes, significantly improving both staff satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Digitizing the Federally Required 45-Day Student Screener
One workflow stands out for Kyrene as both high-volume and high-stakes: the federally mandated 45-day screener, required for every new student—including more than 1,300 kindergarteners annually.
Historically, this process was one of the district’s most burdensome:
- Teachers received individualized links via a complex mail-merge process
- Weekly spreadsheet matching required hours of manual effort
- Routing to principals depended on staff intervention
- Parent notification letters required separate tools
- Office staff spent countless hours tracking, filing, and following up
- Compliance was difficult to monitor and verify
The timing made the process even more difficult. The start of the school year was already one of the busiest times in the district, and staff were trying to manage 45-day deadlines while also juggling registrations, schedules, and everything else.
On top of that, Kyrene often had to wait on records from previous districts—sometimes 30 days or more—before finding out whether a screener had already been completed, which meant valuable time could be lost before identifying a new student’s needs.
The Softdocs Transformation
Automated Identification and Delivery
Smart Workflow for Teachers
Conditional Routing for Administrators
Only forms requiring action appear in administrator inboxes.
- No concerns: The workflow ends and files automatically.
- Concerns present: The form routes directly to the principal or assistant principal for review.
Built-In Parent Communication
Administrative Flexibility
Softdocs enables quick adjustments for real-world situations:- Rerouting forms when teachers are absent or have left the district
- Unlocking forms if one administrator opens but doesn’t complete
- Reassigning tasks when leadership changes
The 45-Day Screener is more than a compliance requirement. It’s about giving educators clarity, giving administrators confidence, and giving students the timely support they deserve. Join Christie McDougall from Kyrene School District for a 30-minute demo of their 45-Day Screener workflow—one of the most important processes districts manage each year. Duration: 30 minutes.
The Impact: Faster, Clearer, More Compliant
- 1,700+ screeners processed in four months since going live mid-August
- Last year, by comparison, the district processed over 2,000 screeners over the full school year. This underscores just how large and ongoing the workload is.
- Weekly workload reduced from 1–2 hours to about 10 minutes
- Screening and review timelines are always in compliance
- Dashboards provide real-time visibility across all schools
- Files automatically upload into Synergy, making them visible to both staff and parents
- Previously, these screeners were often buried in cumulative files that parents might never see unless they specifically requested records, sometimes years later.
- Now, the screener is part of a transparent, electronic educational record that can be accessed far more easily by both staff and families, supporting clearer communication when concerns are identified.
- State monitoring previously took days, now takes about one hour total
- Instead of asking every school to pull samples, waiting on responses, and manually tallying results, the team can now answer monitoring requests from a single dashboard—turning what used to be a multi-day, multi-school effort into a straightforward, one-hour task.
Early Results and Expanding Impact
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Reduced manual routing and lost forms: No more chasing paperwork through emails or district mail.
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Faster processing time: What once took up to an hour now takes only minutes.
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Built-in tracking and notifications: Staff always know the status of their form submission.
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Cleaner compliance and audit trails: Simplifying reporting and reviews.
Powering Strategic Insight with Power BI
A unique part of Kyrene’s digital strategy is its integration with Power BI via Softdocs’ replicated database. As a data-driven district, Kyrene uses Power BI for nearly all analytics and reporting.
By connecting Softdocs form data to Power BI, district leaders plan to analyze:
- Trends in 45-day screener outcomes, such as vision or hearing concerns.
- Absence patterns by type or time of year, helping inform staffing decisions.
- Form submission volumes and workflow performance metrics.
Future Expansion and Long-Term Vision
While Kyrene’s rollout began with a focused set of HR forms, the district's vision for the Softdocs Platform has quickly evolved into something much larger and more transformative.
The successful automation of the 45-day screener has become a blueprint for how other complex, multi-step workflows can be digitized across the district. By bringing this and other impactful processess into Softdocs, Kyrene sees the potential to eliminate paper, improve tracking, and give staff faster access to the data they need.
As each new workflow goes live, word spreads organically across departments. Leaders in finance, student services, governance, and community education are now lining up to get their own processes into the system.
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HR and employee services: notice of intent for degree-related pay adjustments, memorandums of understanding, confidentiality agreements, and district-wide policy forms (grievances and complaints)
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Finance and business operations: direct deposit forms, travel reimbursement requests, and other finance-related workflows
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Student and community services: parental consent forms, state-mandated English Language Learner (ELL) assessments, free and reduced lunch waivers, and facilities usage forms for community education
To manage demand, the team is building internal capacity, learning to handle more advanced form types like parent-facing broadcasts and interdepartmental agreements. “We’re getting more training so we can start cranking them out for all these different departments,” said Belding.
Building a Softdocs District
The ultimate goal for Kyrene? To make Softdocs the foundation of a unified, district-wide process strategy.
From the start, Kyrene felt supported in turning that vision into reality. Belding describes the Softdocs implementation as smooth and well-organized, with no surprises.
By bringing one of its most compliance-heavy, districtwide processes into Softdocs, Kyrene demonstrated how automation can eliminate risk, reduce manual work, and provide immediate value to staff and students.
The district is empowering staff at every level, from classroom teachers to district leadership, with the information they need to work more efficiently and serve students better. With more departments asking, “Can we use Softdocs for that too?” the vision of a fully connected, paperless district is closer than ever.
For Kyrene, the progress so far is only the first step. The foundation is in place, the momentum is building, and the vision is clear: this is just the beginning.
Location
Tempe, AZ
Size of organization
13,000 students across 25 schools
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