Back to School! Is your Paper Shredding Plan Ready to Go?

With South Dakota schools getting back in session, it’s time to make sure your data security plan is ready to go. This includes having a plan in place to shred sensitive documents to protect your school, staff, and students.

What Can Your School Shred?

From preschools to universities, every educational institute generates piles of paperwork. All of the student records, employee records, meeting minutes, and much more leave an enormous paper trail. Much of it contains sensitive information that you cannot simply toss into the recycling bin. In the U.S., schools must be compliant with the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) regulations and any state or local regulations covering employees and campus visitors.

The exact length of time you must keep student records varies by state and even school district. Before you begin the process of a purging your documents, make sure you comply with all overseeing regulations.

Benefits of Professional Shredding vs. In-House Shredding

Once you’ve decided which documents can be destroyed, it’s time to determine exactly how to get the job done. Hiring a service for your document destruction has many advantages:

Security

With a professional shredding service, only qualified people will be handling your school’s sensitive data.

Cost-effectiveness

Professionals will get the job done quickly and efficiently. Imagine if your office staff were to hand-shred all those documents individually?

Compliance

You can be sure to stay in FERPA compliance with the secure handling of sensitive data.

Versatility

A professional service can destroy not just paper records but also hard drives.

Environmental Responsibility

When you go with a professional service, you reduce waste when they recycle your destroyed data.

Flexibility

Many professional services offer on-site and off-site shredding services, depending on your preferences or needs.

Certification

When you use a professional shredding service, you create an audit trail complete with a certification of destruction for the destroyed documents.

In addition to all these benefits, you also get peace of mind knowing that all your sensitive data has been securely and completely destroyed. If you opt for on-site shredding, you can assign one or more school employees to observe the shredding process to ensure the company has completed every step as expected.

Once you’ve experienced how safe and easy it is to hire a professional shredding service, get a secure document destruction cart at your facility to conveniently dispose of sensitive data that doesn’t need to be stored. When the cart is full, the vendor will take it offsite to a certified facility for shredding. You can also opt for onsite shredding as a weekly, biweekly, or monthly service.

It is a daunting task, but contracting with a reliable document shredding service will make the entire process easier and more efficient.

SEAM can help your South Dakota school stay FERPA-compliant with secure document shredding. If you’d like more information about our services, contact SEAM today.