LaGRANGE – The Troup County Board of Education plans to vote on the renewal of its contract with the Troup County Archives, which funds the storage and retrieval of records for the school system.

The Troup County Archives has dedicated an estimated 3,500 feet of shelving to records for Troup County School System students and personnel, and requests for those records are handled by the archives. Without the contract with the archives, school system personnel would be taken away from other tasks in order to maintain and retrieve the archived records on a regular basis.

“They have for years handled some of our record searches and things with parents when they need transcripts and things when they go past a certain year, and they will be directed to handle that with the archives,” said Chief Financial Officer Byron Jones. “We pay them a fee every year.”

The fee for the Troup County Archives to handle the searches is usually not covered in school board meetings, but since the operating expenses were more than $30,000 a year it was brought before the board. The amount covers 9.06 percent of the archives’ operating expenses for the year.

Moving records online has been considered, but a system is not currently in place to make that change, and the school system has been satisfied with the job that the archives has done in the past.

“We could look at some things in the future for online, and things of that nature that we as a cabinet have actually talked about, but for now we need to keep doing this until we can get our arms around that process to be able to be different,” Jones said. “I think they provide a pretty good service for us right now and for years have been.”

According to officials, requests for retrieval of those records is fairly high, and even when they were not, the school system is required by law to maintain those records.

“You’d be surprised at the number of requests for searches of old records that comes through (there) that used to come through us, and this is one of the things that the archives took over for us – which is a great help,” said School Board Member Ted Alford.

The Troup County Board of Education is scheduled to meet on Thursday at 5:30 p.m. at 100 Davis Road, Building C.