ESA Work Group Meeting - 2024-09-27

Participants

Meeting Materials

• ESA Playbook (Draft)

Agenda:

• Introductions

• Meeting Norms

• Initial Priorities

• ESA Playbook (draft)

Notes

These note complement the slide deck above and make the most sense when read along with the deck.

• Introductions

  • Mission of work group

    • Connect community, collect feedback, provide ability to scale

    • Provide directions and strategies, feedback on tech roadmap, prioritization

  • Nexus OR

    • Started implementing Ed-Fi

  • CREC - long-term Ed-Fi support

  • Texas

    • Started project 3 years ago

  • Hamilton 

    • Large service agency

  • Kentucky 

    • Started Ed-Fi last year

  • Allegheny

    • District previously implemented Ed-Fi

    • Launching data hub at regional level

  • Nebraska

    • Launching ODS to provide data to school districts

• Meeting Norms

  • Limiting membership to ESA staff for open conversations; vendor partners are members of separate Ed-Fi community groups

  • Agenda topics collected from members and prioritized for next meetings

  • Meetings are not recorded except for demos

  • Summarized meeting notes and previous Collaborative Work Group notes are available in Tech Docs

    • Educational Service Agency (ESA) Work Group

  • Community.ed-fi.org - platform for members to collaborate on topics

    • Education Service and Local Agencies Group

  • Meeting cadence

    • Start with monthly cadence

      • Doodle Poll will be sent to set schedule for next 3-4 months

    • May break out to special interest group for topics requiring timely turnaround

• Discussion scope and strategy

  • Will address issues not just at the tip of the iceberg but also longer term issues to provide strategies and support

• Initial Priorities

  • Most issues are not technical issues. Most relate to process, organization, strategic, understanding what’s working/what’s not working

  • Vendor Support and Involvement with data standards

  • Layering additional services

  • Working with or without your state

  • Finding use cases that scale

  • Business Planning for success

    • Implementation

    • Adoption

    • Sustainability

  • Timing expectations between ideation and sustainability

  • Mike M - how ESAs engage with districts during implementation; making sure there’s strong plan, especially around data validation

  • A lot of use cases are often not Ed-Fi standard, often extensions

• ESA Playbook

  • Feedback from the last Ed-Fi Tech Congress was that Ed-Fi should be more prescriptive in providing best practices and guidelines.

    • SEA Playbook published State Education Agencies - Implementation Playbook

    • Tech Provider Playbook published

      • Technology Providers - Implementation Playbook

  • Draft ESA Playbook

    • Looking for feedback from members

  • Main purpose

    • For new ESA to learn and follow best practices

    • Allows going back to the SEA, vendors, and districts for them to better align to make ESAs successful

  • Slide 7 - additional use case is local accountability / dashboards that communicate with community

  • Implementation Section

    • Intended audience is high level director to distribute among their team

  • Knowing who are the MSP, who to talk to, would be helpful for organization to start with

  • Not all states provide the same level of support for Ed-Fi; suggest add slide to show different roles state can play

    • David - could be a KB article for deeper dive

  • Bigger question for ESA to get SIS onboard, if state is not implementing

    • Interested in how to talk to SIS, e.g. PowerSchool

  • Interested in community negotiation power with SIS

    • Most states are conducive to one standard, but others would not advocate for 1 standard and/or 1 vendor

    • Colorado is: Infinite Campus, Powerschool, Alma, and GoEdustar

    • Kentucky has one: Infinite Campus

    • There's definitely an interest in the benefits of a single standard, even if a single SIS is out of the picture for local control reasons

    • Districts using Ed-Fi because it enables local control use case, longitudinal database

  • Sharing of district facing communication resources

    • Small understandable communications/collaterals

    • David - Texas Exchange is onboarding districts and may be able to share experience

      • Taxas Exchange - we will be happy to share

    • CREC has 2 types of communications we can share

      • Already ready to participate

      • Recruiting/outreach

Action Items

• David to send out poll to priority initial agenda topics

• Ann to send Doodle Poll to schedule monthly meetings

• Members to review and provide feedbacks for ESA Playbook (Draft)

Next Meeting: TBD