Make your meeting materials ‘click’ with CSBA’s Agenda Online service
Published: April 1, 2011
Since it premiered five years ago, Agenda Online from CSBA has been helping school boards save resources. Copying and collating agendas the traditional way consumes reams of paper and scads of staff time, not to mention the delivery expenses; the switch to an online format can save districts from hundreds to thousands of dollars each year.
Agenda Online is a subscription service that allows school personnel to create agendas for board meetings from any computer with Internet access. The program makes it easy to add supporting documents and minutes, track attendance, and record votes, among other features.
By centralizing the process online, each board or staff member accessing the agenda is assured of seeing the latest version. Members of the public can be granted access to view agendas and supporting documents from their own computers.
Angie Keil, the executive assistant in the Lake Tahoe Unified School District, enjoys how easy it is to create and navigate through board agendas with Agenda Online, such as the ability to copy repeating items to a new agenda with the click of a mouse.
“I like the fact I can put links in [the agenda] where board members and the public can find more information,” she said, also noting the value of the word search function.
Searching for documents in the paper archives used to take Keil a long time, and the district office only had room to store two years of full board packets. “When we needed something older,” Keil said, “we’d have to trek out to warehouse in the dirt and snow. But now they’re all online, so we have none of that.”
The Menifee Union Elementary School District, in Riverside County, began using Agenda Online about two years ago. Before that, said Steve Thornton, MUESD’s director of technology, staff prepared board packets “the old-fashioned way,” by compiling word processing documents that were hand-delivered by courier.
“It was really quite a tedious process,” and managing attachments was a nightmare, Thornton said.
After researching its options, the district chose Agenda Online. “It’s a really good product,” Thornton said. “It does what we need it to do and does it reliably.”
Board members—even those who weren’t particularly tech-savvy—learned how to use the program quickly, according to Thornton. Instead of carting around bulky documents, board members can review agendas on their home computer through the Web-based interface, add notes and questions on items, and retrieve their annotated version of the agenda online in the boardroom. District department staff also find it easy to submit agenda items directly in the Agenda Online program.
“It’s so simple for everyone now,” Thornton said.
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