SIS SIG - Meeting 14 - 2025.05.19

Participants

First Name	Last Name	Organization
Nathan	Gandomi	Ed-Fi Alliance
Maria	Ragone	Ed-Fi Alliance
Jason	Hoekstra	Ed-Fi Alliance
Brad	Evenson	Skyward
Carrie	Coey	Skyward
Josh	Bergman	Skyward
Meg	Morgan	Jupiter
Oscar	Ortega	Edupoint

Agenda

Community Conversations from TC 2025: data hub and statewide challenges, how we will address them
Review draft guidance to reframe "Parallel Year"
Certification Changes for SY 26-27: newly required elements, Universal ID, Security
Next month: NACHOS and reducing business logic burden

Notes & Discussion Highlights

Community Conversations from TC 2025: data hub and statewide challenges
- Playbook revisions: updates focused on early data visibility, change management planning, reducing late-stage surprises.
- Parallel Year Phase Guidance: draft new guidance to help SEAs avoid or reduce the burden of full parallel year.
- Due Diligence & Expectations: create more visible sharing of best practices between states and “NACHOS” reporting to spotlight SEA progress and gaps in planning, validation, and extension governance
- Business Logic Simplification: working directly with SEAs to offload business rule enforcement from vendors and handle validations centrally
- Assessment Certification Governance: Assessment SIG will govern the next phase of Ed-Fi assessment certification, ensuring certification better aligns with vendor capabilities and field needs.
- Validation Tooling: We are advocating that SEAs own more of the tooling for data validation, visualization, and rule enforcement — especially for ODS visibility and level 2 errors.
- Reusability emphasis: Encouraging future implementations to reuse existing district data pipelines wherever possible, rather than requiring redundant re-ingestion and setup.
- CCSSO Collaboration: Working with SEA working group and national conveners (e.g., CCSSO) to strengthen how state-to-state collaboration on extension policy, planning, and business logic governance can be improved.
Review draft guidance to reframe "Parallel Year"
- Feedback from the group was to move slowly and validate with other parties before making a full recommendation the change parallel year guidance.
  - The burden of dual support for the parallel year is not the biggest issue. Desire to avoid year over year support.
  - District size is important to consider. There needs to be a strategy in place for small, medium, large, and XL districts.
  - Different states have different reporting periods with different requirements for each period. The parallel year helps account for those differences. A shorter/small scoped pilot may not catch all those differences.
  - A shorter phase window may not be advantageous. It can take the full year for the users to understand the change required, how to make changes, validate, error support. Factor in support tickets
Certification Changes for SY 26-27: Report to discuss newly required elements
Next meeting:
- Universal ID
- Security
- Project NACHOS update