What Schools Ask Before Choosing Case Management Software

Before a school district or university chooses case management software, someone has to ask the hard questions. Recently, that someone was a prospective client.

They were evaluating Casearoo and wanted to understand it from the ground up: what counts as a case, whether the size of a district matters, how the software supports Title IX and Section 504, and what their technical team would need to see before approving a vendor. They agreed to let us record the conversation and share it here. We’ve kept their name out of it.

The questions are theirs. The answers come from Casearoo founder David DiChristopher. Both have been edited for length and clarity, and we’ve added background where it helps. If you’re comparing case management software for schools, chances are you’re asking the same things.

What is Casearoo, and who is it built for?

Casearoo is incident reporting and case management software built specifically for education: K-12 school districts of every size, as well as colleges and universities.

It gives the people responsible for sensitive cases, such as Title IX coordinators, student conduct staff and HR teams, one secure place to receive reports, track each case from start to finish and keep the records they’re required to retain.

Is Casearoo only for large districts and universities?

No. Size matters less than most people expect. What we look at is how many reports an institution receives and whether it can keep up with them.

A district with 500 students can be overwhelmed with cases, while a university with 5,000 students might see relatively few. Enrollment and staff size are part of the picture, but report volume is the real measure. And a report can be almost anything: a student misconduct report, a sexual harassment complaint, a concern about an employee’s conduct.

Smaller districts can feel the strain the most. It’s common for one administrator to handle Title IX, Section 504 and HR complaints on top of their regular job, so keeping every case organized matters just as much for them as it does for a large district.

What counts as an incident or a case?

Almost anything. If someone needs to submit information to a district or university, and the institution needs to take it in and track it over time, Casearoo can manage it.

The most common examples are Title IX and student conduct, along with HR investigations and equal employment opportunity (EEO) complaints. It gets more specific from there: leave requests under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), accommodation requests under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and Section 504 requests. At its core, it comes down to three things — intake, tracking over time and record retention.

Retention is the part people underestimate. Institutions are required to keep these records, and how long depends on the type of record and the state. Most often it’s five to seven years. Federal Title IX regulations, for example, require schools to keep records of sexual harassment investigations for seven years.

How does case management software help with Section 504 requests?

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in any program that receives federal funding. For schools, that often means providing accommodations so a student with a disability has equal access to learning. When a parent or student makes a request, the school is obligated to respond.

Case management software becomes the system that keeps everyone accountable for following through. Many districts, and some universities, still track these requests with outdated methods — I’d almost call them archaic. And something as important as a 504 request can get lost along the way.

Spreadsheets were never designed to take in requests, hold them and track them, and nothing in a spreadsheet holds anyone accountable. I’ve seen it more times than I can count: a request is made, and then nothing happens. Meanwhile, a student may be going without support they’re entitled to.

Casearoo’s built-in reminders and notifications change that. When a request comes in, the people responsible are told it arrived and reminded that it needs action, so it doesn’t sit unanswered in someone’s inbox. Section 504 is also one of several civil rights obligations that reach beyond Title IX, which is why it helps to manage them in the same place.

How do schools use case management software for Title IX?

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal funding. When districts and universities talk about risk, this is usually what they mean. The regulations lay out specific steps schools must follow when they respond to a report, and in my experience that’s where much of the lawsuit risk sits. Every report matters, but Title IX is the one you can’t afford to get wrong.

It also covers more than people assume. Title IX is often associated with athletics — if the boys’ baseball team gets new uniforms, the girls’ softball team should too — and that’s part of it. But the law reaches much further, including sexual harassment and sexual assault.

Pregnancy is the one that surprises districts. Title IX prohibits discrimination based on pregnancy, childbirth and related conditions, and many schools don’t realize pregnancy accommodations should be tracked through their Title IX process.

That’s where case management software helps. It gives the Title IX coordinator one place to receive reports, track each step of the process and document what was done and when. And because Title IX rules have changed several times in recent years, a consistent, complete record matters more than ever.

Do states handle case tracking differently?

They do. I’m not a lawyer, and none of this is legal advice, but some states are far more focused on formally tracking these incidents than others.

California is a good example. State rules require districts to follow a formal process for complaints of discrimination, harassment and bullying, known as the Uniform Complaint Procedures, and Title IX is a very active topic there. Many California districts are reaching out to get their procedures in place. Texas and Virginia are two more states where I’m seeing K-12 districts move to formalize how they track cases.

Population plays a part, too. Larger states tend to generate more of these conversations.

Why are K-12 districts looking at case management software?

Over the past five years I’ve spoken with a lot of school districts, and the way they take in and track cases is remarkably similar. Most rely on some kind of fillable PDF.

Think about it from a parent’s side. Federal regulations require districts to designate a Title IX coordinator and publish that person’s contact information, including on the district website. In practice, it isn’t always posted, and when it is, it can be hard to find. Once you find it, you’re asked to fill out a PDF, scan it and send it back — and you may or may not hear that it was received.

On the other side of that report are the same outdated systems: spreadsheets, Google Drive, email, pen and paper. Some districts have told me they still track cases on a whiteboard in a locked office. That’s alarming, because we’re talking about children and incidents that happened to them.

This has become personal for me. When I started out in sales, knocking on doors, I heard the same thing over and over: reports were coming in, and there was no reliable way to track them. Any parent who sends their child to school wants to know that if something happens, the district has the right tools to respond — not just for their child, but for every child. Whether a district has 50 students or 50,000, it needs a real system for tracking these cases.

To be candid, the conversation also has to include risk. Mishandled cases can lead to lawsuits, and lawsuits are expensive. That’s often when districts start paying attention. I want to be clear: Casearoo doesn’t prevent lawsuits, and no system can prevent every one. But a proper system for intake and tracking reduces much of the risk districts take on when they rely on outdated methods.

So the goal is to keep everything about a case in one place?

Exactly. The report, who was involved, what was done about it and when — all of it belongs in one record. When that information is scattered across email threads, shared drives and someone’s personal files, nobody has the full picture, and eventually someone has to piece it back together, often under pressure. It’s a big reason Title IX teams outgrow spreadsheets and email.

What does a district’s IT team need to see before approving a vendor?

Certain safeguards have to be in place before a district will even consider a vendor, and technical teams ask about them early. Case files often contain student education records, which are protected under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), along with sensitive details about employees, so the scrutiny is well deserved.

The first questions are usually about three things:

• Data processing agreements. We sign a data processing agreement with every client. It spells out how their data can be used, stored and protected.
• US-based data storage. All client data lives in the United States, on US-based servers.
• Encryption in transit and at rest. Data is encrypted while it moves between users and our servers, and while it’s stored.

What advantages aren’t obvious until you’re using it?

The obvious benefits are great. But once you’re in the day-to-day work, things come up that nobody thinks about ahead of time. The example I come back to most is staff turnover.

Say a Title IX coordinator has run cases out of a spreadsheet, a Google Drive folder and their inbox for six years. What happens when that coordinator leaves, gets promoted or retires? Does the case information go with them? Is anything lost in the transition? Is the district now exposed?

The district has to bring in a new Title IX coordinator or a new HR director. Is that person being set up to succeed or to fail? Do they even know where the case files are?

You don’t think about these things until you’re in it. And when you are, it’s a very big deal.

When cases live in Casearoo, the information stays with the district, not the individual, and it doesn’t become IT’s job to recover records from someone who has moved on. The new coordinator can get up to speed on open cases quickly, and because of the audit trail built into the system, you know exactly where your data is and what’s happened to it, even through the transition.

Key takeaways

• Report volume matters more than enrollment. A small district can need case management software as much as a large university.
• A case can be a Title IX report, a student conduct issue, an HR or EEO complaint, or an FMLA, ADA or Section 504 request.
• Records often have to be kept for five to seven years, and federal Title IX regulations require seven years for sexual harassment investigation records.
• Built-in reminders and notifications help make sure requests like Section 504 accommodations are acted on.
• Before approving a vendor, IT teams look for data processing agreements, US-based data storage, and encryption in transit and at rest.
• When cases live in one system, the records stay with the district when staff leave.

How Casearoo handles this: Casearoo by department.