Spotlight On: School Forms

Derek Nichols

Today, we’re taking a look at School Forms and giving you a general overview on what they are, how to set them up, and answering a couple common questions we see. Each product within Blackbaud’s Education Management suite has exclusive and unique features that help them stand out from one another. Depending on what course of action schools need to take, they’ll likely delve into a specific area of the product such as Report Cards with Academics, Admissions for Enrollment management, and website building with School Website to name a few.

That makes School Forms extra unique as they span multiple education products, something which is fairly rare. Considering that many schools are currently using them, or about to with end of year activities rapidly approaching, what better time than now to go over some of the basics?

What Are School Forms?
Let’s start at the very beginning. School forms, like many other forms that we offer inside of Blackbaud’s Education management products, are there to help you collect and update data from families, candidates, students, and other users.

In terms of School forms, we have a variety of different types that can be made including:

• Acknowledgement or Permission – These types of forms are best suited when a school needs confirmation from a family or student for things like field trip approvals, reading the student hand book, etc. This also enables schools to use the form field element to create customized questions or other types of data entry.
• Emergency Contact – Best used for collecting information for knowing who to contact for a student and how to reach them. This also enables schools to use the form field element to create customized questions or other types of data entry.
• Profile Updates – This type of form gathers general information about a user including preferred names, addresses, phone numbers, etc. This also enables schools to use the form field element to create customized questions or other types of data entry.
• Blank/General – A general form that can be used for any purpose. This also enables schools to use the form field element to create customized questions or other types of data entry.
• Medical – As expected, this type of School form deals directly with a student’s health care including things like allergies, medications, conditions, physicians, etc. Please note that we only use Medical School Forms to collect data and to ensure the information remains HIPAA compliant, only school nurses can create or edit medical forms. For more on this type of School form, please see our help topic.

How to Set Up School Forms
As I hinted at above, School Forms span multiple Education management products and can be found under Academics, School Website, Extracurricular, Core, and Enrollment Management from Content and then School Forms.

Select +Add Form to get started and pick which type of form you want to make. Next, you’ll go through the basic settings of the form, including things like who will complete it, when it’s due, who will get notified, and more. For the General Overview of these settings, check out our help file.

Once that’s complete, select Save & edit to create the elements of the form. Add sections as needed as well as blocks and elements for the type of data you’re looking to collect. There’s also a preview button to see what the form will look like to the end user.

For more information on creating and managing a school form, make sure to check out our online help.

Burning Questions and Pain Points
Naturally, School Forms encompass a lot of details, so Blackbaud does see plenty of questions related to them. Here are some handy tips to a couple of common questions we see come through.

Who Can Access School Forms?
By default, application managers have access including grading, attendance, admissions, etc. However, the access list can be modified to add or remove certain roles as needed. To do this, go to Core, Security, and then Roles. Select the specific role you want to modify from the list, and then select Tasks. Continue to scroll down until you find the School Form section and then Edit the part you want to enable or remove.

Please keep in mind that the role changes won’t officially take place until the platform manager logs out complete and then logs back into the system.

Alternatively, you can control who has access on a much smaller scale from the role permissions above. To enable other faculty to view the submitted forms, open the Form Settings and under General, select Yes for the Is this form student centric? option. Then choose the faculty who should have access to view and print the responses.

How Can I See Results?
Responses to a non-medical submitted form can be viewed from Files & Forms at the top of any school capability. School forms can be opened, completed, printed, or exported for users with rights access to them. In addition, School Forms can be accessed from the user’s Core profile.

Now, seeing the actual form results is entirely permissions based. If users don’t have access to a certain form, it won’t appear in Files & Forms at all. However, platform managers who don't have access to a specific form can still view its name, type, due date, and status.

To have this changed, an application manager will need to grant the educator access through the form settings as detailed above.

For the sake of clarity, it’s also worth noting that School Forms are not universal. So if you create a School Form under Core, it will only live there and won’t show up in the Enrollment Management list as well. Each product is self-contained.

While there’s plenty more in regards to School Forms, we hope this high level overview has given you a head start on how to use these important features inside of Blackbaud’s Education management products. Don’t forget to check out our online help for more on School Forms and also don’t forget to stop by next week as we go over all of the new features and updates that arrived in the month of April. See you then!

Dawn Alonso

Thanks for highlighting these, we use quite a few of them. But there are still some tweaks we would love to see:

For School forms in Core we would like a File Upload block (currently only available in Nurse’s forms under Academics)

For Medical forms the Nurse would like this option for Blank forms (actually to be able to do Blank forms in general and have it attach to the user’s medical file). Currently available for Blank forms in Core. Or at least be able to add “form field” to any of the Medical forms.