Putnam Schools Digitizing Old Personnel Records

The Putnam County School System working with an external company to digitize all of its old personnel records.

Human Resources Director Angela Knight said the district frequently has to provide documents on former employees to resolve retirement issues or share with family when they pass away. Knight said the new system will be much more efficient as they will be scanning documents dating back to the year 2000.

“It is cumbersome to have so much paper,” Knight said. “And to go and dig, and I mean really dig and lift heavy boxes, to try and find a record that you hope you don’t skip. So it’s going to be just great.”

Knight said the papers will be shredded once the district is confident that everything has been properly scanned. Knight said getting rid of the documents will give the central office a lot of much-needed storage space.

“It wouldn’t be turned into an office or anything ’cause it’s not appropriate for that,” Knight said. “It is a vault, it smells like an old vault, but it would allow us more room to store other things that we need.”

Knight said she has been looking for the right system to use for this project for the past eight years. Knight said she learned about this service when the Putnam County Courthouse used it to scan its own files.

“They’re going to take the documents to Michigan, to a scanning center, scan them all in,” Knight said. “We’ll have access to them while they’re at Michigan and then they will come back to us.”

Knight said all active and future employees are recorded in a different digital program that dates back to July 1, 2024. Knight said the district aims to have its record system be completely paperless in the future.

“There will be two systems ’cause we couldn’t get everything on their system,” Knight said. “But the new system is one that we use daily here.”

Knight said their physical records go all the way back to the early 1900s. Knight said the older documents will not be scanned because they are faded, difficult to work with, and would cost more to process.

“When we go into the vault and look they have some of the old, old schools,” Knight said. “Like Nash’s Chapel and Cedar Hills when they were little, small community schools. They’re very interesting to look at. But we’re not able to do those this go around but might in the future.”