Attendees

Materials

Agenda

• Ed-Fi Updates
• Discussion on Pronouns
• Discussion on Preferred Names
• Summary of discussion and Action items
• Next meeting topic discussion

Notes

Gender / Sex Feedback

• Student.BirthSex or StudentEducationOrganizationAssociation.SexDescriptor ?
  • WI uses the latter
  • Preferable not to rename
  • Just clarify the description
• GenderIdentity
  • StudentEducationOrganizationAssociation is the right place

Pronouns

• Why store pronoun? What use case?
  • None at the state level - in fact, would prefer not to have it so that it cannot be "weaponized" in reporting.
  • Locally, 1) improving communication with students, staff, parents contacts, and candidates, 2) application interoperability.
  • The interoperability use case is largely forward-thinking, preparing for future vendor support.
• Descriptor or string?
  • Pronouns are not well standardized, and standardization may defeat the purpose of providing people with freedom to choose.
  • Free text string also frees the Alliance from having to choose default pronoun descriptors.
  • CONCLUSION: favor the free-text string.
• Some vendors actually store pronoun instead of Sex, and infer SexDescriptor from the pronoun.
• What about parent notification?
  • Should there be two different pronouns, recognizing that the school might track a pronoun choice that parents don't know about? 
  • Alternately, a sizeable free text field could accommodate that.
• There are a lot of open questions. If the Alliance adds this to the Data Standard, should we wait until 2024?
  • Changes made in 2024 won't be in production for anyone until at least 2025-2026 school year, maybe later
  • If being forward-thinking, that's a long time to wait to get this functionality
• Pronouns can be a lightning rod. No matter what your intention is, some people will be opposed and perhaps even dramatically so. There's the possibility of push back against the whole concept of using Ed-Fi.
  • Same goes for Gender Identity.
• If used, for students it should be on StudentEducationOrganizationAssociation, not on Student.

Preferred Name

• Less controversial that Pronoun
  • Nickname
  • Preferring one part of a hyphenated last name
  • Returning to birth name instead of married name
  • Clarifying pronunciation
• Again, use case is LEA interoperability.
• Should cover both First and Last name.
• At least one SIS has "Chosen First Name"

After the meeting: could Pronoun be looked at in the same way as Preferred Name? That is, addressing it as a way of helping improve communication without any reference to LGBTQIA+ politics. For example, there are an increasing number of English-language given names used for any gender ("Taylor", "Madison", "Pat"), and non-English names that are not easy to guess for those not deeply aware of the cultural/linguistic background. Pronoun would help first day teachers and substitutes to know what to say. On the other hand, someone opposed to tracking pronouns would say that SexDescriptor is sufficient for this communication purpose: if sex is female, then use "she/her/hers", end of story.