Student records from closed Arlington, Forest View high schools to be digitized, then shred

Thousands of pages of old, yellowed student records from two long-closed Arlington Heights high schools — Arlington and Forest View — will soon be shredded after digital versions are created, as part of a push to go paperless in Northwest Suburban High School District 214.

Though the schools have been gone for decades — declining enrollment led to Arlington’s closure in 1984, and Forest View’s in 1986 — District 214 has kept dozens of boxes full of permanent records in storage.

The Illinois Local Records Act requires school districts to retain student records such as transcripts, grades and attendance for at least 60 years.

At the same time, alumni of both schools still contact district offices looking for old transcripts and other documents, officials say.

District 214 has stored files from the two shuttered Arlington Heights schools and other long-term district records at its building at 2123 S. Arlington Heights Road in Arlington Heights. But the district has to vacate the property soon, after school board members agreed last August to sell it to developer Bradford Allen.

While Superintendent Scott Rowe said some student services staff have begun “chipping away” at digitizing records maintained at the six current school buildings, the process is being sped up at the 2123 building.

The state requires school districts maintain actual paper files of certain documents — like school board meeting minutes, which in District 214 go back to 1914 — but is OK with digital files for other paperwork.

“There are specific records that must be kept, and this will narrow that down to the minimum of what we have to keep,” Rowe said. “So that way if someone were to contact us looking for that permanent record, we could easily access it, and either email it to them in pdf or print it and give it to them.”

The district will pay Datamation Imaging Services $61,488 to prepare, scan and index an estimated 664,000 individual pieces of paper contained in 166 boxes. They’re mostly student records, but also financial records and community education program files.

The Willowbrook-based company, which has done similar work for other Illinois school districts, will provide searchable electronic files, then upload them to YellowFolder, a cloud-based data storage system.

Datamation will shred the paper copies upon district authorization. Officials are confident the new files won’t be lost to cyberspace.

“We have done extensive planning and preparation with YellowFolder,” Rowe said. “The documents are ours. They are being stored in a pdf version in the cloud so we don’t have to purchase servers for them to live on. Should something happen with YellowFolder and they fail or go under, we still have access to our documents and we could transfer that to a new service.”