Everything you need to know about electronic signatures for parent consent forms

Educators at both the K-12 and higher-ed levels rely on parental consent forms in a wide range of situations: confirming parents’ approval for students’ participation in field trips, sports, surveys, and media coverage, and for emergencies where teachers and admins may need to make student health decisions without a parent present. However, processing traditional paper forms is a time-consuming and error-prone process — which is why a growing number of education professionals are switching to electronic consent forms.

In fact, a 2021 Hotwire survey reveals that 33 percent of K-12 schools are converting paper forms to digital ones. That percentage is even higher at colleges and universities. Most admins cite “easier access to information” as the primary reason behind this transformation — but in practical terms, many educators say they’re simply tired of dealing with paper consent forms, which often get lost or misplaced in transit — and frequently come back incompletely filled, unsigned, or too late to be useful for an intended activity or an unplanned emergency.

The benefits of digital forms

Electronic signature consent forms represent major improvements in all these areas. They’re easy to send and fill electronically and can be tracked throughout every stage of their lifecycle. In apps like Adobe Acrobat Sign, forms can even be sent with pre-filled fields and built-in reminders, to streamline the process for parents, while built-in digital signature technology helps prevent document signing forgery by verifying each signer’s identity. Plus, once a digital consent form has been completed, it can be instantly and automatically returned to the sender with the click of a button — enabling admins to process hundreds or even thousands of forms in mere minutes.

Here, we’ll take a closer look at the benefits of electronic signatures for parental consent forms and discover how easy it is to digitize yours — building a remote signing workflow that simplifies form processing throughout your institution.

Paperless parent consent letters are much more likely to be completed

Most institutions send out numerous parental permission forms over the course of a school year — but those forms don’t always come back in time; or sometimes at all. Students often lose the forms they’re sent home with or forget to pass these forms along to their parents. Parents, in turn, may misplace the forms, or fill them out incompletely, or forget to sign them. Even properly signed and completed forms often get lost on the way back to the school — causing students to be excluded from sports and field trips, or even denied on-site medical treatment.

Most frustratingly of all, it’s impossible to track a paper form once it’s been sent to a parent — and if a form comes back incomplete or unsigned, the process of getting it properly completed and signed can often take weeks, while students miss out on activities in the meantime. For all these reasons, more than a third of U.S. schools are now converting paper consent forms to paperless ones, which come with built-in capabilities for electronic sending, real-time tracking, personalized in-app guidance, automatic reminders, and instantaneous signing and submission.

As a result, digital parent consent forms are far more likely to get completed and signed in a timely manner. For example, compare the traditional paper form process against a modern electronic form process in Adobe Acrobat Sign. As soon as a teacher creates a form in Acrobat, they can share the form right within Acrobat Sign, which automatically tracks each recipient’s interactions with the form, and provides up-to-the-minute info on which parents still need to complete it. The teacher can then personally follow up with those parents — or can even provide real-time guidance within the app itself, to ensure that every consent form gets filled and signed on time.

E-signed consent forms provide enhanced security and privacy

Collecting parental signatures on traditional paper forms can be another massive source of frustration. Even parents who remember to fill out a form may forget to sign it. Even a properly signed form may get smudged or torn on its way back to school, making the signature tricky to verify — and even worse, some students may forge their parents’ signatures by imitating their handwriting, creating fake parental “approvals” for activities their parents never hear about.

A lack of security around parental consent forms can be a serious legal issue for schools, since some forms include personally identifiable information (PII) that could be used to identify, locate or contact a student — including their full name, address, or social security number. Given these concerns, it’s easy to understand why 25 percent of educators at both the K-12 and higher-ed levels have transitioned from “wet” paper signatures to electronic signing, on parental consent forms as well as a wide range of other potentially sensitive document types.

In contrast to a paper form, which can potentially display a student’s PII to anyone who opens a filing cabinet or glances at someone else’s inbox, a PDF consent form keeps each student’s PII private and secure, viewable only by people who’ve been granted access to the file in question. Whether digital forms are stored on a local hard drive, or in a digital filing cabinet like Adobe Creative Cloud, permission levels for each of those files can be set for specific users — safeguarding students’ personal details by making sure they’re only viewable and shareable by parents and authorized personnel.

Digitizing and managing parental permission forms is simple

Converting a paper consent form to a digital one is much quicker and simpler than you might expect — in fact, any educator can do it in minutes with the help of some handy mobile apps. Many teachers and admins start with Adobe Scan, which uses any iOS or Android device’s onboard camera to convert paper worksheets to multi-page PDF files that can be opened in Acrobat. There, Adobe’s Sensei AI technology can automatically populate a digital form with dynamic text boxes, drop-down fields, multi-selection menus, and custom response fields.

These PDFs can then be shared right within Acrobat, which provides built-in tracking and real-time updates for every form and integrates seamlessly with Acrobat Sign to collect and validate each parent’s e-signature. Once a parent has filled and signed a consent form, a simple click of the “Submit” button sends it straight back to the teacher, and to any other teachers and admins who’ve been authorized to receive it. That means every digitally signed consent form can be filed automatically within a secure “digital cabinet” like Microsoft SharePoint or Google Drive, where it’ll be easy to find and retrieve next time it’s needed. And amazingly, this all happens within mere seconds of the form being signed.

In fact, research shows that educators who automate their form processes in this way can increase transaction speeds by 30 percent, improve compliance by 25 percent, and reduce errors by up to 85 percent — dramatically enhancing the speed, security, consistency and convenience of their schools’ document processes.

Ready to begin your school’s journey toward digital transformation? Visit the Adobe Education Exchange website, and our Education Resource Hub, for free guides and how-to videos that’ll get you started in no time.