COVID-19 continues to spread around the world, forcing schools to adjust their routines. Now, at the time of writing, some 124,000 K-12 schools are closed because of the pandemic, impacting at least 55 million students.
Ensuring Students Receive What They Need
Almost 30 million of our nation’s students rely on schools for nutritious meals, and over 95% of U.S. schools participate in the National School Lunch Program, which is the second-largest food assistance program in the nation. School leaders are working diligently to ensure these millions of students have access to food by helping students to continue to receive meals during the pandemic. But it goes farther than just food schools are also focused on providing students with everything they need to continue their educations and be successful, including items such as homework and laptops.
Whether your school is handing out meals, homework, musical instruments, or laptops, there are many logistical challenges to overcome.
Leveraging Technology to Overcome Distribution Challenges
Schools are quickly developing ways to track distributions and ensure each student receives the correct item. Raptor Technologies, a trusted school safety software provider to over 32,000 K-12 customers in the U.S., is seeing many of our partner schools digitally track and record all their distributions within the Raptor Emergency Management system.
While one component of the Raptor Emergency Management system, Raptor Reunification, was built to help schools reunify students with approved guardians during a crisis, many customers are innovating using the system to instead help record and track distributions.
The three new scenarios Raptor is seeing are:
- Meal delivery with inventory outside same person who greets the car hands the meal to the student or guardian
- Meal delivery with inventory inside one person greets the car and asks for students names then alerts a runner, who is inside with the meals, to bring the meal outside to the car
- Homework and/or IT Device delivery schools distributing and tracking items released to specific students
Raptor helps schools manage the logistical challenges, streamline the delivery process, and record transactions for these and other scenarios. For demonstrations of each scenario, view our recent webinar here.
This process works in complete alignment with The I Love U Guys Foundations new Standard Distribution Method, which is specifically designed to help schools with procedures for distribution during extended school closures.
Accurate Record-Keeping
These transactions are instantly recorded in the Raptor system. In real time, schools can see the number and types of items delivered, as well as the list of students who have received their item(s). Schools can quickly export this data from the system in the form of reports to see who borrowed laptops and how many meals have been delivered, for example. These reports can help schools receive their equipment back from the students and also help schools claim government reimbursement for delivered meals.
