Student Identification and Demographics Domain - Overview

Key Entities

This domain contains:

• The Student entity, which captures important information and characteristics of a student.
• The StudentEducationOrganizationAssociation, which captures demographic and similar characteristics of a student that are specific to a student's relationship with a particular education organization. Note that this entity does not have dates attached; it is intended to capture the current demographics of a student as assessed by the education organization. It should be thought of as a core part of the student record, but scoped to the education organization (as such demographic assessments can vary by education organization).
• The Contact entity, which spans all variants of a parent or guardian. 
• The StudentContactAssociation entity, which links students and parents and defines the relationship.

Key Concepts

The key concepts include the following:

• Parents as well as guardians are stored within the Contact entity in the Ed-Fi data model. The Contact entity can also represent other important contacts that have been approved by the parent or guardian for contact in cases of emergency or even pick-up from school.

• The Contact entity is kept as a separate entity that is related to a Student entity through an Association entity. This contrasts other systems that merely track parents as elements of student records. This allows contact information to be more easily kept up to date for parents with multiple students.

• If extending the Contract entity, be careful to keep any information dealing with the relationship on the StudentContactAssociation entity record.