SWG 2021-07-22 Meeting

Participation

Support

Nancy Wilson, Ann Su - Ed-Fi Governance Support

Meeting recording LINK

Refer to the PPT  for additional details on the meeting minutes and discussions.

The meeting was held on 2021-07-22 2:00Pm -3:00pm CT via WebEx

Agenda

• #1 Evaluation of students both enrolled and non-enrolled students for services. – What TEA has done, and WI is planning for.
• #2 Authorization Design for non-enrolled students needing services.
• #3 Open topics

Meeting Notes

What are States’ requirements?
Federally, states are required to show two indicators in their state performance plan for doing timely evaluation of students for special education services. SPP-11 and SPP-12 are the indicators. This is called the Child Find collection and it is the same for all states. How they are collecting in Ed-Fi could vary from state to state.
What States are Interested in Child Find Collection?
Alliance heard this from TEA first and states like NE, IN (already collecting the child find collection in Ed-Fi) and WI (which is in the discovery phase of gathering requirements around this collection) are interested in this work.

#1 Evaluation of students both enrolled and non-enrolled students for services. – What TEA has done, and WI is planning for.

• TEA
  • TEA has collected this data for many years and LEAs used to do the calculation and send the aggregate numbers over to TEA. Who is in and out of compliance when the students are evaluated.  Starting from 2021-2022 school year, TEA will be collecting this at the student level starting from when the parent consents that the student needs to be evaluated, when the evaluation actually occurs and what determination is being made whether or not the student is eligible for SPED.  TEA will then do the compliance calculations and provide it back to the districts. 
  • SPPI-11 - non enrolled students come into play. Ages 3-21, Home schooled or private schooled.  Districts should be evaluating these students if the parents request that. 
  • SPPI-12 - Students in the early childhood program, when they reach their 3rd birthday, then they need to be evaluated by the public school, when they need to move to the public setting whether they are eligible for SPED services.

•  WI
  • Currently do not collect evaluation or child find collection data in API.
  • We do have a request specifically about the timely evaluation. Recently put in for us.  We are in the discovery phase for this.  We have sent a survey to determine what the LEA needs are in this data collection. 
  • We are also going through membership and transportation aid where we will have non-enrolled students.
  • Students could be enrolled in a private school but the public school district will be providing only transportation services to students bussing them back and forth from school. These students are not enrolled in the public school district but receiving a ‘Type’ of service from their public school districts.  Authorization on StudentSpecialEducationProgramAssociation will work for the non-enrolled students receiving special education program services.  But for the Transportation scenario and students using public districts for taking their state ACT exam scenario will not work with the authorization on StudentSpecialEducationProgramAssociation.  We would go with authorization on  StudentEducationOrganizationResponsibilityAssociation in that case.   It will work well for us. 
  • According to Audrey, the Eligibility Determination has a different scope or context compared to what the current Ed-Fi SPED model provides. The Ed-Fi SPED model covers the context around services provided to students.
  • Evaluation process - we got the referral for her to be evaluated. That was a different process.  Initial Evaluation is different from the services provided.  There is a federal law on how quickly that has to proceed.  Many of the students who are referred will not be found to be eligible.  Very protective of the SPED domain who gets to write to that.  Using the SPED for the authorization made us uncomfortable.  Initial evaluation did not belong there.  Many of the students are NOT sped students.  We are looking at Transportation aid, this student is transported x number of miles.  No enrollment for these kids.  In large part, it gives us a way for a district to attest that they have the responsibility for that student.  We can keep it a little bit tighter. 

• AZ
  • There are two parts to this.
  • Part 1 - Specifically for PreSchool Students (The below AssessmentOutcome is not for 0-3 years data coming from Department of Economic Security) -
  • SPED program offices wanted to collect performance indicators for preschool students.
  • Requirement - submit the performance indicator for every preschool student at an entry and exist.
  • For preschool students we have developed the following: We created an extension for StudentSpecialEducationProgramAssociationAssessmentOutcome with the programtype as ‘SpecialEd’.  We started collecting this data from SY 2021. 
  • These are evaluations.

• IDEA Part C - The Department of Economic Security has the data for students from 0-3 years of students. DOE has a data sharing agreement with DES.  The AZEDS API is open for the Department of Economic Security.  When a child comes to DES, they create an identity through DOE’s AZEDS.  We call it as a student (0-3 years old) DES is treated as a LEA, the therapy centers are treated as schools.  These under the DES LEA.  DES is enrolling these students into a school (therapy school).  We are collecting the below info from DES, DES is sending the Student/StudentSchoolAssociation for these students and this is phase 1 of the project: 
  • What is the name of the child?
  • Where that child is enrolled into?
  • System to system integration. DES to AZEDS integration is done automatically.  AZEDS opened up the API to the DES system.  DES is able to call the Student/StudentSchoolAssociation data directly from their system.  
  • Phase 2 In the future, we are going to collect the biological parents, legal parents and other information that are needed by DES. DES has the evaluation data.  They want to send the evaluation results.
• There are multiple dates in the program collection. Referral Date, Eligibility Date, Program Enrollment Date.  WI has ‘Date Eligibility Received’ and ‘Parent Consent Date’
• Focus for the SEA Work Group is the eligibility determination for children as they reach age 3 and are determined to be eligible for IDEA Part B services through LEAs. Alternative ways to characterize these currently non-enrolled students:
  • 
    • The authorization strategy has a student connected to an LEA and a school and has been expanded to include students associated to a program using one of two associations. See link to details on this.
    • Vendors need permission/the ability to push students without an enrollment record.
• IN
  • We use the ‘Primary School’ identifier.  If the school is primary or non-primary, the school needs to send the data to the State. 
  • We instructed the schools, if students are receiving services from a school district like SPED, CTE or Title, they have to report the data to the state.  They get the SPED funding.  They need to report the services.  Students who are dual enrolled non-public/public homeschool/public, or in the case of  CTEm, they are coming only for a few classes, the non-primary school will give us the data, the primary school is false. 
  • One school is the enrolling school, they don’t have all of the education needs, the neighboring school provides all the education, the enrolling school sends them over to the neighboring school.  The enrolling school will have the ‘primary school’ being FALSE but the receiving school will have ‘primary school’ being TRUE.  The enrolling school will be in the Education Organization record (not sure if it is Responsibility) but claims Both the accountable school and the neighboring school will send the data over.   In summary, if a student is dual enrolled there is enrollment for both schools, if a student is receiving service only, they will still have an enrollment record.  IN prefers bypassing the StudentSchoolAssociation and going after the SPED record. 
  • If it is truly a service only school 

• DE
  • Delaware has a school designated as 'non-attendance' in the SIS, which the students are enrolled in for cases Iike this, I believe.
• NE
  • NE has always asked for enrollment records for non-enrolled students even before ed-fi, so we continued that. They are differentiated by entering and exiting before the first day of school, and/or we use the residency status descriptor. But I like the idea of a program-student claim model, it makes a lot of sense for several use cases to me
• TX
  • Going forward with use case in Pilot 3 at the end of 21-22 school year
  • Would like to have standardizing across all states

#2 Authorization Design for non-enrolled students needing services.

• TX
  • Legislation pass requiring charter schools to report wait list with student demographic information who have not been enrolled into the charter

• WI
  
  • Application process for student applying to non-resident district
  • Could be wait-listed there
  • May be able to use proposed new entity approach on slide above.
• IN
  • Interested in using new entity approach for their Choice applications
• NE
  • Has another use case with home school applications (had months of backlog this year which created problems for LEAs)

#3 Open topics

• AZ
  • Firearms data - how are states handling this?
  • Discipline data as well - some states use extensions; will have discussion with Delaware, Nebraska and Wisconsin on how they do this with extensions.
• WI - gathering Discipline data for Federal reporting via EdFi.
• MI-  also has discipline and weapons data, which is collected as part of our discipline data.
• MN - I am looking for storing data for project - based instruction and/or other alternative reporting of instruction completion. Does this exist?
• TX - Texas collects discipline data.
• IN - Indiana collects both discipline and firearm data - 2022 SY will be the first time we will use Ed-Fi to collect this information so i have not been through the process yet
• NE - SPED was the other big driver of us having extensions for discipline
• Action: NE, DE, WI, AZ to have one on one discussion

Action Items:

• Sayee to work on the use case for #2 Authorization Design for non-enrolled students needing services.
• NE, DE, WI, AZ to have one on one discussion on discipline data

Next meeting: 05 Aug 2021 

Last Update: 19 Aug 2021