SUMMARY COST ANALYSIS

Texas Education Agency's

Student Records Exchange Analysis Subproject

VOLUME

The TEA Student Records Exchange Analysis Subproject reported that each

year Texas schools process approximately 450,000 "district-to-district" student

records requests. In addition, Texas districts currently manually process

720,000 high school transcript requests for colleges and universities annually.

CURRENT COST

The report also estimated that local school districts incur a human resources cost

of more than $8.3 million dollars each year. This cost is determined by

estimating the average time each student record request requires (approximately

30 minutes to request, locate, copy, and fax) multiplied by the average salary of

school district staff who handle such requests ($13 per hour) and the total

requests made each year for records and transcripts. Another $720,000 was

added to the total for the postage required to mail transcripts to institutions of

higher education.

POTENTIAL SAVINGS

TEA estimates that an automated record/transcript exchange system would cut

the 30 minutes of time required to five minutes for student records and one

minute for transcripts, and eliminate the cost for postage altogether. This in turn

would reduce the human resource cost to $639,000, for a savings of almost $7.7

million.

$8.3M + $720K

= $9.02M of expenses for records/transcripts

450,000 record exchanges per year (10% student mobility)

+ 720,000 transcripts sent to postsecondary/year

= 1,170,000 records/transcripts sent per year

$9.02M / 1,170,000

= $7.71 of district/school expenses per record/transcript sent