ESA Work Group Meeting - 2024-10-25

Participants

Agenda:

• ESA Sustainability round table. ESA members will discuss how they planned for sustainability, what challenges they faced, and what worked best for them to achieve their planning.

• Implementation best practices.  ESA members will discuss their partners, tech stack, what worked well, collaborative community (vendor, state, collabs, etc), and what they would improve next time.

• Vendor Support.  Discuss the vendor landscape in your area and how that helped and hurt.  What pre-work steps were successful in engaging and bringing the vendor community in line with the ESA plans.

Notes

• Introduction

  • Mike - CTS Manager

• ESA Sustainability round table. ESA members will discuss how they planned for sustainability, what challenges they faced, and what worked best for them to achieve their planning.

  • Mike - Ed-Fi found it important to not have just technical, but also funding to sustain the implementation

  • Rachel

    • Just started our project

    • Interested to learn about sustainability, how you started and things along the way

  • Sean

    • Currently in planning phase

    • Same as Rachel, interested in sustainability, reality and changes made

  • Katie

    • We are grant funded, have another year with funding

    • Interested to hear how to handle at end of grant period

  • June

    • Biggest challenges, we had a strong model, but the SIS updates with various vendors have been a lot harder, which caused retention problem

    • Suggestions

      • As you have vendor relationship, they may want to test in your districts, undermine perception of  solution

      • Set expectation with schools and districts, who tend to do their own roster update; need technology to have data in the system

      • Need to be super proactive in keeping system live, and aggressive communications

      • Different SIS vendor have different processes in moving data in, some better

        1. If you have funding, encourage SIS to update the student records, make sure the utility is useful

        2. District need to do the data quality fixing

    • One mistake in our design process -   roster was replaced, made the system look broken

  • Mike

    • Critical for districts and vendors to communicate

    • Drive milestones for each district, e.g. data validation

  • Letty

    • From technical perspective

      • Building a whole ecosystem that is Ed-Fi compliant, we had 10 partners, building our solution

      • Because of the size and number of vendors, we had a lot of different ways people used

      • Made it more difficult for sustainability

      • Need to make sure vendors are approved for building our solutions

      • We had formal document that has approved technology, followed about 50%, half vendors rolled off, a few remain, less people working on it

      • Gave to vendor partner that had the best process

      • Important to be flexible, as you don’t understand all the complexity upfront

      • How to complete the knowledge transfer as vendors roll off - with documentation and videos

        1. So that remaining 10-12 people at the Exchange can maintain it

    • From organization perspective

      • Important partner bring quality assurance person, and we have the same position internally

      • Adoption is important, it was not as easy as we had thought

        1. Thought people would immediately understand the solution

        2. There are some strategies to help with that

           1. Texas CEO of Information System had idea to partner with the Exchange

           2. Because they are non-profit, they had functionally in the backlog that they couldn’t build

           3. It was a win for their users to match with us, since we had functionality that their users can use right away

           4. It was win for us since we were able to get 75% of Texas to use the Exchange

      • From the very beginning, at contracting phase, it needs to be clear up front who owns the intellectual property being built, if there is going to be licensing fee to use

        1. Need a technical attorney to review the technical contract

      • Sean - please clarify what is being built?

        1. Letty - we have about 10 products

           1. Interface with our product is behind the architecture, a bit confusing who owns it

        2. Rachel - how is the licensing fee based

           1. Letty - we got 2 grants, so it’s fee for now; we will charge a fee per student (low cost for district); district gets access to the entire Exchange

           2. 2 products fee based after the grant period

    • Rachel - we also have grant, so it’s free for districts for now

      • Do you have feedback from districts about being charged a fee?

      • June - our districts view our products as vendor products, districts had budget set aside for for-profit products

        1. June Marcel 10/25/2024 2:25 PM • Pricing — Student-Centered Reporting Solution

        2. Districts had concerns about quality and service they can expect

      • Rachel - is your membership fee just for the ESA?

        1. June - just for the type of work related to Ed-Fi, we do not have an ESA in CO

    • Jay

      • We’ve been funded with a grant fund in SC. We are starting very low dues (subsidized this year)

      • Goal is to get into their financing system as a vendor

      • Due to help us keep building our services

      • We don’t expect the due to increase significantly, but we will need to bring on additional resources

      • To the extent possible, get multiple revenue stream, including state funding; providing services in a traditional model

      • We just put our first draft proposal out for service and training; got our first client next week 

    • Letty

      • If you have Ed-Fi ODS, any vendor can plug in, then they will pay a fee

      • Katie

        1. We are doing fee on a per student basis

        2. Still in the process of defining how it would look like

        3. Roster data will stay free for the grant period

        4. Thought of integrating with Exchange and SSO and charging a fee

  • CCMR reporting

    • Katie - CCMR Insight on the Exchange

    • Mike - you actually have funding for a house built for the implementation for that use case by districts

      • May be another funding other states can think about

  • Bill - FLCODE

    • We don’t have DOE support; grass-root effort; board of volunteers, mostly CIOs, to get things started; have grant at this very beginning stage

    • Would like to learn more about the Exchange

    • Use seed funding to get people join FLCODE

    • Goal is to work on use cases and build solutions for a repository available to other districts

    • Main SIS vendors in FL are Focus and Skyward who are Ed-Fi compliant

  • Letty

    • The Exchange is a suite of products that are Ed-Fi compliant

    • Districts can launch the different products for their analytic tools via the ODS

    • Can extract files, e.g. roster data, to feed into other systems

  • Bill

    • Interested in learning everyone’s status, approach

      • Jay - SC data governance

        1. Started as partner with state DOE and district

        2. Incorporated as a non-profit

        3. Advantage is get discounts

        4. State department was the driving force for creating our group

        5. We are in the position of providing data governance and district support; unlike other ESAs

        6. We translate for both sides, connecting state to the district and resources

      • Letty

        1. https://txedexchange.net/

        2. We were funded by the state at the beginning

        3. We do state reporting

        4. The Exchange, with support from Ed-Fi, stood up our state reporting

        5. We also received grant from another non-profit

        6. We are a department under the region, but we get funding from the state

      • Rachel

        1. In Kentucky

        2. We have 8 collabs

        3. Non-profits, no funding from state

        4. Goal is to bring all districts on board

        5. Potential get support from the state if we can show that we have good data

        6. We had kick off of our project in September, invited stakeholders to kick-off meeting, showcase chronic absenteeism reporting

           1. Create dashboard to show students with chronic absences

           2. Bring all data into one place; all vendors are Ed-Fi compliant

      • Sean

        1. Want to get someone from the state DOE to see benefits

        2. Which domains are state CIO looking for?

           1. Rachel - attendance

              1. Districts were losing funding due to absences; our reporting can help district track 

• Michael Minuto - Please be sure to join the Ed-Fi ESA Community Group on our community portal at the link below. You can use this to stay in touch with each other between meetings:

  • https://community.ed-fi.org/s/group/0F9VL0000000YT70AM/education-service-and-local-agencies

=== Topics saved for next meeting ===

• Implementation best practices.  ESA members will discuss their partners, tech stack, what worked well, collaborative community (vendor, state, collabs, etc), and what they would improve next time.

• Vendor Support.  Discuss the vendor landscape in your area and how that helped and hurt.  What pre-work steps were successful in engaging and bringing the vendor community in line with the ESA plans.

Action Items

Next Meeting: Nov 22, 2024