The Challenge
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) supports education throughout the
state for over 880,000 students in 426 school districts. In response to the reporting
requirements of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act also known as the No
Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA), DPI maintains individual student records of selected
information for all students in all districts, including charter schools, County Children
with Disabilities Education Boards (CCDEBs) and two state residential schools. DPI
required a mechanism for keeping these individual records anonymous and unique by a
state assigned student identifier, the Wisconsin Student Number (WSN).
In addition, DPI required an information system to support longitudinal studies of student
success without disclosing individual student identity. The information system was
needed to support the following objectives:
- To produce student data needed for adequate yearly progress (AYP) and ESEA
Report Card purposes
- To report academic indicators that measure what they were intended to measure
and that have compatible values in comparable situations across districts and
schools
- To account for all students
- To minimize the data collection and reporting burden
- To facilitate the use of data for school improvement purposes
- To protect student privacy.
The required information system must meet many challenges. The state of Wisconsin is a
local control state. DPI does not require any specific administrative software system or
Student Information System (SIS). The configuration of the SIS in districts is very
diverse. Some districts have comprehensive central district-wide, fully networked single
vendor SIS for all their administrative and academic data. Other districts may have
multiple software vendors, data at the school level and little or no network connectivity;
data may be maintained in multiple files or databases specific to a program. Wisconsin
districts range in size from under 100 students to 100,000 students. School/district staff
have a wide range of technical expertise. The information system had to work well in all
environments.
Third Day's Solution
TDS developed a system to generate, store, assign, and locate unique statewide student
identifiers for all public school students in pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, elementary and
secondary public education. This webbased system allows for online and batch
processing. The Wisconsin Student Locator System (WSLS) assigns each student a 10
digit unduplicated random number that is unique and does not change throughout the
student's school life. WSLS protects pupil confidentiality, and was designed such that it
abides by provisions of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). WSLS
provides secure and appropriate access for activities such as student records inquiry,
retrieval, and transfer.
To meet the information needs to support DPI's studies of student success, Third Day
Solutions developed the Individual Student Enrollment System (ISES). ISES is a web
based system that allows public school and/or district staff to report and view individual
student information and the Department of Public Instruction to summarize and aggregate
this information. It provides a wealth of reporting capabilities and supports the student
testing process. The application is expected to expand in future years to incorporate
additional DPI data collections and to increase in data collection frequency.
TDS developed the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction WSLS Locator system
and Individual Student Enrollment system (ISES):
- By conducting Joint Application Development (JAD) sessions to gather the
requirements;
- By using proof-of-concepts in development of detailed design;
- By applying knowledge learned from developing MSIS;
- By prototyping the application, before proceeding with construction, training,
implementation, and post implementation support; and
- By studying and applying information from National Center for Education
Statistics/National Forum on Education Statistics publications.
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