School system goes paperless

Havre Daily News/Nikki Carlson

A stack of board packets sent out by Havre Public Schools so far this year.

Starting next month, the Havre Public School districts will be burning through a lot less paper. Not, unfortunately, for students and their homework assignments or permissions slips, but rather on the administrative side.

At the Havre Board of Trustees special meeting on Tuesday, all of the trustees were given new lower-end laptops for them to handle their business as trustees, from their school email accounts to receiving, reviewing and taking notes on the novel-length packets that are sent out for each of their meetings.

"One of the primary reasons (for doing this) is cutting down on paper usage, " Superintendent Andy Carlson said. "In the long term, absolutely there will be savings. "

He explained that not only the amount of paper they use and the money to mail them would be saved, but also the man-hours that the districts spend every month compiling the tomes to be sent out.

Now an email will be sent out with the meeting packet in a PDF attachment.

Eventually, according to Assistant Superintendent Tom Korst, these packets will be put up on the districts' website, http://www.havre.k12.mt.us, where anyone can access not only the list of activities that will be addressed on a given agenda, but also whatever background information about the activity is included in the packet.

Other than cutting costs, Carlson hopes that the changes will increase the involvement of the community with digital transparency.

"The more information we get out into the community, the better we will be able to continually improve communications, " Carlson said.