CLONE - Delaware is implementing some extensions to support its' funding process and has several suggestions.

Delaware is in the early stages of analyzing its' state school funding process (called 'unit count') and has come up additional data requirements needed to support this process.

A new vendor is taking up this calculation process, so we are in the early stages of verifying all the needed data is available for pull via the Ed-Fi API.  Our tentative plan is to provide the information we believe is required for next school year (2023-24) so the vendor can work on integration after their initial fall funding calculation.  The following year, we anticipate a parallel run using Ed-Fi and the current data feed.

We brought these issues to the SEA workgroup, then met additionally with Sayee and Ed Comer to review the mappings.  These are the suggestions that came out of that meeting.  We may implement these in the Delaware extensions for next year, but are trying to avoid increasing our extension footprint, so hope they could be evaluated for core inclusion (at which point we would then use the core columns).

1-  By Delaware statute, a preliminary funding calculation is performed the year before a funding year and schools are guaranteed 98% of the funding the preliminary calculation indicates.  This allows hiring of teachers to the correct level before the final fall Unit Count Period (Sept 30).  Delaware uses two fields entered in the eSchoolPlus SIS registration screen 'Next Year School' and 'Next Year Grade' in this preliminary calculation process, and we'd like to request a school reference and a grade descriptor being added to StudentSchoolAssociation:

NextYearSchoolId (school reference)

NextYearGradeLevelDescriptorId

We discussed making these indicators as the district level or whether a full StudentSchoolAssociation record around these next year values was justified.  The former would not be have a reference to school or gradelevel.  The latter would require a manufactured 'Begin Date', as well as implying that the student was preregistered for next year (which they may also be, which would have its’ own StudentSchoolAssociation record ).   The additional columns seemed the best solution to us.  I believe Wisconsin has some similar extension functionality implemented.

2- Another piece of data we require for the funding process is information about the student's choice status:

Currently StudentSchoolAssociation has a SchoolChoiceTransfer bit.  The description in the data standard references a particular federal statute, for which reason we initially did not use it.  Additionally, choice in Delaware does not have the connotation of a 'transfer'.  We would request that the definition of the field be expanded to encompass any school choice and also suggestion perhaps it be renamed 'SchoolChoice' or something not using the word 'transfer'.  We plan to use this core field for the coming year.

Additionally, the justification for choice is tracked in our system- is this NCLB choice or state or local?  This may well reference a particular statute in Delaware or Federal law or even a local policy.   We would request a ChoiceBasisDescriptor be added to StudentSchoolAssociation.  This could hold values like Federal, State, Local, ‘NCLB Victim of a Violent Felony’, ‘Delaware Title 14 § 401’, etc.…

3- Finally, while meeting with Ed and Sayee, we noted Wisconsin extends an EnrollmentTypeDescriptor on StudentSchoolAssociation, exactly as we do.  Perhaps this is a candidate for core?  Our current values are C- 'Current', P -'Preregistered and S - 'Summer'.