Best way for parents to digitally sign forms?

Nathan Ong

Every year, new and returning students have enrollment packets sent out that parents have to sign and return over the summer before the new school year starts.

Because we work in a special education, part of the forms also includes clinical services they wish their child to receive, like LAS, OT, ET, etc. that parents check off and sign for.

For now, it's these forms are sent out as PDFs that parents fill out and also email back, but it's not very convenient and we would like it to be more centralized.

Is there a feature where parents who log in can sign for forms like our enrollment packets?

Thanks for reading.

Cheryl Costello

@Nathan Ong Hi Nathan. We use school forms built into Blackbaud for all of our reenrollment forms. You create the forms in either academics, or Core and once activated parents will get a banner letting them know they have forms to review. Each office (athletics, OSL, business office) is able to review their forms to make sure all are submitted prior to the start of school.

Happy to chat offline if you'd like additional information.

Best,

Cheryl

Coco Parham

@Nathan Ong We use the school forms in Blackbaud. For PDF's to be used, we save them as a picture to upload into the form and add text boxes with verbiage that the family has read the form and agree to it, or sign up for the program, etc.

Nathan Ong

@Coco Parham Thank you! This is helpful to know especially the PDF part.

Nathan Ong

@Cheryl Costello Thank you for this! I'll try building out some forms and see how it works, and reach out if I have any questions.

Appreciate it.

Mary Stanton

@Nathan Ong Hi Nathan - if any of these PDFs should be considered medical forms, the School Forms in Academics, has a Medical type form which allows for a parent to upload a document. The uploaded doc gets stored in Nurse's office. For example, we use these Medical forms for allergy info we gather each summer; the form contains a link to a writable PDF that a parent downloads, updates the PDF offline and then uploads the completed PDF from within the medical form.

In other cases we used the Acknowledgement/Permission type School form in Core and basically just ‘recreated’ the PDF there.

Let me know if you have any questions! Good luck.

Nathan Ong

@Mary Stanton
Thank you! That medical form information piece was key for me wondering how parents can upload documents.

Just a question since you have used both…is there any big difference between using Core or Academics for school form? I built our packet all on Core, but see that Medical form is only available in Academics. I wonder if data collection would be easier if our entire enrollment packet lived in Academics?

I posted to a new thread, in case you wanted to respond there: