Much like a growing number of city councils, district attorney offices, courts and government agencies, more and more schools and school boards across the nation are going paperless.

We can think of no greater consumer of paper products than the average school – from homework assignments and textbooks to student records and personnel files, education hasn’t always been the “greenest” field. According to the Issaquah (WA) School District, this one district alone used:

• 22.8 million sheets of white, 8.5x11 photocopy paper in the 2009-10 school year, at a cost of $134,475
• 2.25 million sheets of paper per month, at a cost of $13,027.50

And this in a district with just 17,000 students enrolled in 24 schools. In a weeklong experiment, Sammamish’s Skyline High School attempted to go paperless and ended up reducing its consumption by about 60 percent, using just 20,000 sheets of paper. They accomplished this through a range of approaches, from using PowerPoint or other programs to avoid printing handouts, to posting assignment documents to their class documents.

In another sign that schools may be jumping on the paperless bandwagon with more and more frequency, the Princeton Review released its Guide to 311 Green Colleges earlier this year, in partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council. Among the initiatives in the 220-page guide:

• The Anchorage campus of Alaska Pacific University undertook a paperless initiative to cut down on waste.
• Iona College in New Rochelle, NY has a Paperless Conservation Campaign that has been so effective at reducing paper consumption that it’s been recognized by the National Wildlife Federation Campus Ecology Program.
• The University of Mount Union in Alliance, OH is reinventing its infrastructure to go paperless, including a 100 percent paperless faculty and staff directory and catalog; electronically reported grades; and online room reservations, IT equipment orders and vehicle reservations. In addition, personal handbooks and most forms are online.
• Purchase College, SUNY has implemented HR software that has eliminated paper for recruitment and appointment transactions, with similar efforts in place within the facilities and admissions departments.
• SUNY’s Stony Brook University and the University of South Dakota have both gone paperless in many departments.
• The University of West Ontario’s online academic calendar has saved the school 11 million sheets of paper each year.

eBridge’s clients in the education field report that online document management has saved time, effort and cost in several departments. At  in Central Texas, record retention policies were creating a never-ending pileup of paper. They started scanning in AP and PO-related documents in the business office, and soon moved their use of web-based document management to other departments, resulting in easier file access, increased file protection and increased productivity and time savings schoolwide.

And for San Joaquin Valley College in California, the use of paperless document management in its student records, HR and accounts receivables departments has promised huge savings -- $66,000 in off-site storage for the student records department alone, which must hold on to hundreds of thousands of student records from 35 years’ worth of enrollment at three locations.

“We just had a federal audit, and the auditor used eBridge,” said Gail McElroy, SJVC’s academic application administrator. “We gave her access to everything, where normally, we would have to pull the files, give them to her to manually go through, then put them back – our part alone would be eight hours’ worth of work.”

Paperless initiatives can take many forms at many different schools. Whether it’s a robust recycling program or a full-fledged online document management system, education no longer needs to be rooted in its paper-based traditions.