Mission

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Mission

The Educational Service Agency (ESA) Work Group is an entity within the Ed-Fi Governance structure and is intended to enhance LEA collaboratives’ ESA’s (and on behalf of member LEAs) engagement in, input into and use of the Ed-Fi data and technology standards.

Statement of Purpose

The CWG’s ESA work group’s main purpose is to represent the perspectives of the LEA collaboratives ESAs operating in the Ed-Fi Community to the Ed-Fi Governance processes with the purpose of making the Ed-Fi data and technology standards more widely adopted and used. The CWG ESA may make recommendations through the Ed-Fi Governance processes about investment in the Ed-Fi product roadmap and business strategies. 

Goals

The goals for the Work Group include:

1. Prioritization: Identify and prioritize potential Ed-Fi data model and/or technology enhancements needed to positively impact collaboratives’ ESA’s capabilities to onboard and serve LEAs with priority use cases support, and to provide right-sized solutions for small and rural LEAs as well as for medium and large LEAs across a range of technical capabilities.
2. Interoperability: Support and empower collaboratives ESAs to drive native vendor integration and data exchange to/from key applications, using data in secure ecosystems within LEAs, across LEAs, and with SEAs where applicable.
3. Reporting: Enhance the ability of collaboratives ESAs to provide useful data tools to LEA members for analytics, reporting, and data visualization, including downstream uses such as state accountability reporting when applicable.
4. Impact: Harness collaborativesESA's abilities to impact the whole Ed-Fi community through increased LEA adoption, field feedback and adoption of new releases and versions, testing and incubating of RFCs, and through increased usage of high priority and shared use cases.
5. Best practices:  Document and contribute back to the community the best practices that have worked in other collaborativesESAs.  
6. Shared development: Identify, prioritize and pursue projects that can be developed and shared by collaborative ESA resources.

Initial Focus Areas

The initial focus areas for the Work Group include:

1. Collect and inventory current use cases, extensions, member and pipeline growth data. (Q1-ongoing)
2. Discuss, validate, and form recommendations on priority topics in 2021 targeting reduction of cost and variation (field validation of LEA use cases & starter kits, LEA/SEA alignment) and current field issues such as attendance modality. (Q2-Q3)
3. Create a backlog of requests, needs, and supports across collaboratives, and prioritize them. (Q2)
4. Identify enablers, growth blockers, and common data pain points for collaboratives; add to backlog  and to draft 2022 goals. (Q2-Q3)
5. Create a repository of examples and artifacts others may use (e.g. pricing models, support systems/staffing, and health metrics) for existing and new collaboratives to support sustainability and growth goals. (Q3)

Operations

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Operations

The ESA work group will operate under guidelines set forth in the “Community Work Groups Operations Charter”.