When Daniel Mateo has a problem to solve, his first thought is, “Can I do this in Jotform?”
As the assistant superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Mateo oversees Innovation and School Choice for the third largest school district in the United States. After he discovered Jotform Enterprise and purchased an account with a HIPAA-friendly server, other principals started asking how he was managing everything so well. He told them simply: “Jotform.”
“It spread like wildfire,” says Mateo. “Soon other district offices adopted it, as did schools.”
Miami-Dade County Public Schools at a glance
“We purchased a Jotform Enterprise license, and sure enough, as soon as other principals saw what we could do, all the other departments started asking me for licenses,” said Mateo.
Mateo’s department oversees all district magnet schools, library media services, textbooks, Title IV grants, instructional technologies, and more, generating a constant stream of information.
What Miami-Dade County Public Schools staff manage with Jotform Enterprise
Managing events and communities with Jotform Enterprise
Mateo uses Jotform Enterprise to manage the registration and session planning for the roughly 2,000 people who attend the district’s annual conference as well as registrations for the district’s summer school programs.
“We don’t open all 345 school sites, so we use conditional logic and the spreadsheet-to-form widget to map students to specific sites,” says Mateo.
Once a form filler indicates which school the child attends regularly, the automation assigns them to a summer program site, registers them, and populates the information in Google’s Looker Studio, a data visualization dashboard where schools can view students attending their sites. Each student registration triggers the system to clear the student from the list of students to be assigned, so staff know they were processed correctly.
When Miami-Dade activated Microsoft Teams phones for all district teachers, the IT department used Jotform Enterprise to field their support requests.
“If someone needed help, they just submitted the form,” says Mateo. “We use Digest Emails to view daily summaries of the incoming tickets and triage requests as they come in.”
We purchased a Jotform Enterprise license, and as soon as other principals saw what we could do, all the other departments started asking me for licenses.
Daniel Mateo, Assistant Superintendent, Miami-Dade County Public Schools
Automating approvals, attendance, and e-signatures with Jotform Enterprise
To keep up with the myriad administrative approvals in its workflows, the district uses Jotform Sign, Jotform’s e-signature solution.
Mateo built a Jotform App to track and manage staff attendance. When a staff member requests PTO, professional development, or permission to work at a remote site, they just go to the app, sign and submit their request on the form. The entire workflow is automated on the backend.
“It signs their leave card, notifies the person inputting payroll, logs it for us, and creates the calendar entry so administrators can see who will be where and why,” says Mateo. ”We have it all automated. It’s super cool.”
In addition to using the automated Calendar feature in Jotform Tables, Mateo also uses a form integration to populate shared calendars for even greater visibility.
How Jotform Enterprise automates labor-intensive processes for Florida’s largest school district
When Florida passed legislation allowing parents and residents to object to the use of classroom materials like particular books, Mateo again turned to Jotform Enterprise.
We replaced an incredibly complex required state process by digitizing, automating, and auditing it with Jotform Enterprise.
Daniel Mateo, Assistant Superintendent, Miami-Dade County Public Schools
A single form on every school’s website triggers the workflow, so the minute an objection is submitted, the entire process is automated. Multiple linked forms automate and document each step, tracking who receives what and when, as well as the outcome of each complaint. Each complaint is also assigned a case number and an audit trail automatically documents who approved what.
“Principals receive detailed instructions for each step of the policy in chunks. Once they complete a step, it generates the next form, notifies the complainant, regional, and district staff, and keeps triggering until everything’s done and documented,”says Mateo.
“We replaced an incredibly complex required state process by digitizing, automating, and auditing it with Jotform Enterprise,” he says.
Other complex processes and workflows automated by Jotform Enterprise include the district’s tutoring tracking, internal grant proposal program, and system-wide accreditation.
“We used Jotform Enterprise for our entire systemwide accreditation,” says Mateo. “We collected all the artifacts from every school site and clustered them by standards, so it was an easy click for reviewers to evaluate us. All of the responses from the school sites, all of the student, parent, and teacher testimonies, everything was done through Jotform.”
Saving time and improving accuracy with single sign-on and custom branding
Mateo credits Jotform Enterprise’s white labeling, prefill, and single sign-on (SSO) capabilities for saving his team untold hours.
He created a branded template for staff to use so that every form they create looks professional. To keep information consistent across the district’s 345 schools, three regions, and nine voting districts, Mateo uses Jotform Enterprise’s single sign-on integration and prefill features to auto-populate form fields with names, emails, job titles, location data, school names, phone numbers, and more.
“Being able to pull in the Microsoft Entra elements that would otherwise be entered manually makes our database so much cleaner,” says Mateo. “We absolutely love it. It’s a major time saver.”
Advice to education professionals, principals, and administrators
Mateo has advised many principals and educators throughout his career, and he has some simple advice for those struggling to meet all the demands put upon them.
“It’s very simple. Get Jotform. Period. Full stop,” he says. “It solves so many problems. It makes things so much easier. I’m not a spokesperson for Jotform. I’m just saying that when I’m confronted with a problem, my first question is, ‘Can I do that in Jotform?’ Most of the time, the answer is yes. I mean that wholeheartedly. There isn’t a day that we aren’t using Jotform Enterprise.”
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