How Palm Beach County's mechatronics instructor turned static PDFs into fillable forms

After a 40-year career in IT, Lajoyce Perry-Trotter thought she had finished working. Then a friend called and asked her to help with a program for high school students in the School District of Palm Beach County. Today, Lajoyce is a mechatronics instructor at a technical education center in Florida. She wears many hats, teaching students engineering, robotics, programming, and electrical systems, as well as being a field trip coordinator, business liaison, community liaison, and CDE coordinator, among other responsibilities.

Each of those roles comes with paperwork. And in her early days at the center, that was the problem.

The solution

The school district publishes a lot of its forms as static PDFs- documents you can read but can't edit, can't type into, and can't save changes to.

"It was a hot mess nightmare. We had to print things out and write them over and over and over again."

Lajoyce found Lumin when it popped up as a recommended option for opening a PDF. She used the free version for about a year before upgrading to Pro so she could edit forms, save her changes, and come back to them later. Once she had the full toolset, Lumin became her answer for everything.

"Lumin was the answer every time. Whether I was acting as an instructor, a field trip coordinator, or a business liaison, no matter how my needs changed, Lumin remained the solution."

A real example: a business partner emailed her one morning asking her to modify their partnership agreement to add new services. With Lumin, she made the changes in under two minutes. Before Lumin, she would have had to print a blank form, fill it out by hand, and manually check the new items. Multiply that by every field trip, every internship, every certification, every partnership and the time saved isn't small.

Why Lajoyce recommends Lumin

Lumin saves Lajoyce hundreds of hours over the course of a school year. But what she values most is what those hours make possible for her students.

"It's more than quantifiable. There's a number associated with the hours saved, but there's also the intrinsic value for students who get to have experiences that show them their potential future."

When paperwork stops being a bottleneck, students get to the field trips, the internships, and the certifications that show them what a career in advanced manufacturing, engineering, or construction can look like.

In nearly two years of use, her advice to anyone considering Lumin PDF Pro is short: use it.

"You won't regret it. It makes your life really easy."